Vehicle Modeling in Houdini 16.5 - SciFi Dropship

I'd recommend this free course to get started:
https://www.udemy.com/course/vehicle-modeling-in-houdini-16-scifi-dropship/

I've only been using Houdini for a few months and I found this course on Udemy indispensable for learning the basics of modeling (oh, and it's free!):

https://www.udemy.com/course/vehicle-modeling-in-houdini-16-scifi-dropship/

Disclaimer: I'm a beginner too. Houdini's learning curve is insanely steep. You'll to do more than play around with it to get anywhere. If you just got the program and haven't done much with Houdini yet, you really need to learn the interface and basic concepts or you'll end up fighting the software trying to do anything.

For basic UI stuff, this helped me a great deal: https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/introduction-to-houdini-1/

I know it seems boring and long, but I created so much extra work for myself trying to skip through those basics.

Once you can move around in Houdini, do the cupcake project: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/cupcake-project-modeling-and-lookdev/

It's kind of punishing to go through, but if I made it, you can too. You'll learn all kinds of SOP nodes and a detailed look at how to model a complete project in Houdini. Even if you can't quite get everything Rohan does to work in your project, it'll still look great when you are done, and there is plenty to build on to create a portfolio piece that is all your own.

After that, Indie Pixel has a free course on how to make a scifi dropship for a game. It was made for Houdini 16.5, but I haven't encountered anything I didn't understand how to do after the cupcake project.

https://www.udemy.com/course/vehicle-modeling-in-houdini-16-scifi-dropship/

Indie Pixel has a course on making a racetrack level for a game, but I can't comment on that one just yet. I think these will get you up to speed on modeling Houdini to the point where you can hammer out basic models without much help.

I've looked and looked, but if you want anything up to date on effects, Applied Houdini and a couple of other paid places seem to be the only game in town. SideFX has videos on their site that might help (especially the Master Classes). As a fellow beginner, I wouldn't dive into the effects until you have at least one of those two modeling projects done if I were you. The Applied Houdini guy is a great teacher, but if you aren't at least moderately comfortable with modeling, setting up the scenes and moving around in Houdini will trip you up.

Good luck!

Although people will instantly recommend Tokeru and Entagma (as would I), I want to point out that these might not be the most efficient for beginners - although certainly are among the best courses online.

When starting out in Houdini, it's very important to get a grasp of the entire package, even if you are maybe interested in one thing more than the other, which is why the two aforementioned resources are extremely valuable, they cover _all_ aspects of Houdini and show some really neat tricks. BUT, I found that Matt is not always explaining things in detail, and often rushes through a topic and that Entagma tuts, especially ones created by Moritz, are more like a blitz for people already familiar with the topic. I know that the HI5M are new, I still haven't looked at them in detail, but his style of teaching can be daunting and hard to follow without pushing pause each couple of seconds.

My personal recommendation is to go for this PDF published by SideFX: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/houdini-foundations-book/
For starters, just read a bit and understand how Houdini is different from anything else out there. After 2 years of meddling with Houdini, it's only now that I have no trouble following any video tuts, even the most advanced ones. For someone just starting out, a self-paced learning book might be a better way to go. This is for 16.5, and some things are probably not going to be valid for 18, but those are the things you can look up and compare, which is also a great way to see how the program evolved and improved. It's also much, much easier to go back and check something that you forgot than finding a timestamp in a video.

My alternative suggestion is to try and follow tutorials from actual SideFX. I'm talking about the robo-voice tutorials here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCtJA_X05AQ&list=PLXNFA1EysfYmvtkRsL_cgvECQdM_8sOr4 (an actual human being is behind those, believe it or not :) ) I know a lot of people have a problem following these because of how they are narrated, and that sometimes versions of Houdini are outdated, but I found that these clips have a great pace and that I rarely get different results and have to troubleshoot my scene. It's also the one resource where I learned fluid basics without troubles.

One last word: A lot of people say "Houdini is crap for modelling". Don't be discouraged by this. I wholeheartedly suggest going through this free tutorial on Udemy, even before doing anything else: https://www.udemy.com/course/vehicle-modeling-in-houdini-16-scifi-dropship/
because the tutorial is beginner-friendly, gives you lots of homework to finish on your own, and covers the one thing everyone is steering away from when it comes to Houdini, which I think is actually the best way to fall in love with this program and understand it's procedurality - Modeling.