od[force]: Was it a deliberate decision from the start to use Mantra or you did consider mental ray too?
JBD: We did not really consider mental ray for this job, we have plenty to do for the integration of mental ray in Houdini to be clear for us, although we intend to, there is too much luggage The Mill has and wants to use. Tools, plugins, shaders are key for our production output so as you can imagine, we are working on that.
od[force]: How is your relationship with Side Effects? Were they involved (support or otherwise) in the project?
JBD: We had some early talks to them so they were aware we were jumping on a huge job although we managed to not bother them too much. Some questions here and there and some posts on the forums did the trick, although the level and quality of support they provided us has proved that kind of thing and assures us we can build on top and not be abandoned on the wild. They have been extremely helpful all the time and I look forward to keep on working with them.
od[force]: You said you checked Houdini 9. What are your thoughts about it? OK, Mantra is awesome, but what about the UI? Do you find it better than the previous one? Also, what about the fluids? Have you tried them in production conditions?
JBD: The UI is far better, much more approachable and above all the tiny pieces of code that do some initial work for you are very helpful for someone like me which still does not have the, let's say, vocabulary to do it from scratch. In my opinion at some point I will turn off those shelves but for now they are very very very useful.
Also the new UI, which I don't mean only from the graphical point of view, is much more friendly to me in the sense of manipulating and handling of the scene. I imagine many more people trying Houdini in this condition than with version 8.1 which although great, was far more obscure.
I have not tried fluids seriously, although from our little research we are planning to build our fluid tools on top of Houdini so I can already tell you Houdini is here to stay.
