Day one of Houdini...

I am more of a 2D artist, but decided to take VIST 372 in hopes to improve my limited 3D skills and create visually appealing environments. So, I chose Houdini to create 3D models because I dislike Maya. I had so many issues with it in my freshman year of college that I'm traumatized by it. The UI/interface of Houdini is much sleeker than Maya, and has a node base structure that reminds me of Unreal, which I like.

Getting started...

I attempted to model in Houdini, but failed to accomplish anything. This is partly because I am used to modeling in Maya, where you could mess with the geometry faces easily and fluidly. So, I switched to Blender, but the intimidating interface was too much, so I gave up. Then I began to stress over the project because of my lack of 3D modeling, but after some time away from trying to model, I went back to Houdini. After playing around in Houdini, I managed to get a wall and arch going by using the basic shapes provided.

By working with the primitives as polygons, I was able to transform them to the right size and then add splits to them, which made extruding faces simple. At first, the process was really slow because I did not understand how the selection tool worked, but I noticed the "Secured Selection" was enabled. Clicking on it disabled the issue I had with manipulating objects, making the process faster. For the arch, I used a cube primitive for the top part and a curve for the bottom. I combined the two by deleting the bottom of the cube (I changed the arch on a later day).

Estimated time in Houdini: 4+ hours