learning houdini!

It has been an ambition of mine to learn houdini effects for a while and whilst talking to Paul Jones, a Technical Director at Framestore I am going to direct my project to using Houdini in the place of Maya. To become a TD at framestore, knowledge in houdini is essential as it is standard to working with Maya. On first appearance, it is definatly se up for effects. In the comparison of windows below you can see that Houdini immediatly has menus set up for rigid bodies, particles and volume fluids.

BUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT

Getting to this stage is even quite hard. To exchange work between maya and houdini, you need to export FBX files. Seems simple? no. If you have a character animation in your scene that you want to take along with the export, you need to create a geometry cache, which means duplicating the mesh, creating then importing the cache onto the new mesh, then using the export option to select the set and cache and export. Again, seems simple just saying it here, but its taken me around 3HOURS to get a fully sucsessful import...and so far i've just been worried about the geometry. NOWWWW i need to figure out how to import the camera for the rendering and composition of the shot.