Cycles for Houdini
Sep 07, 2020 by CGPress Staff
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Tangent Animation has released an open-source plugin that enables Blender’s Cycles renderer to run inside Houdini. HD Cycles is an “USD/Hydra RenderDelegate plugin that adds support for the Cycles renderer to any client” with the aim of rendering a one-to-one representation of a USD scene with Cycles. The plugin is still in active development, you can read more about the progress and download it from GitHub.
A little more of a preview of the seamless workflow powered by #HdCycles. @openusd really is powering the future. The @CyclesRenderer is such a powerful and fast renderer and this will put it in a lot more people’s hands. Still early in development, but the potential is huge! pic.twitter.com/aFlK78ymq4
— Ben Skinner (@Vochsel) August 16, 2020
I love this
I dont use blender nor houdini but i dont get this…? Why is it good/useful? Houdini has some internal an capable rendering engine right? Also there are other rendering engines for houdini (redshift i think and others), so why port blender one… what are the advantages of this comnbination, i dont get it why its good or usefull, what for…
Could someone explain please?
– mantra (houdini’s own renderer) is VERY-VERY capable but slow, even among the CPU renderers
– karma (the new renderer) is in alpha/ beta stage, it’s unstable and has missing features. and you need to dive into usd to use it.
– cycles is free and everyone likes free stuff 😀
so now we have something free for instant feedback (and rendering)
Just to add another very very slow for mantra. XD And if you use Blender as your final renderer, you can get as well previous from houdini that will look the same (in theory) in blender, so its good to keep using the same renderer. No additional costs, so why not!
Just to add a little bit speed for mantra 😉 Sometimes Im a little bit tired of reading mantra is soo slow..
I think you cant say this renderer is slow and this renderer is fast. And if you do it will really dont say anything. What are you comparing?
Rendering a sphere on a ground with mantra and compare that with other renderers? Maybe that´s what most people do…Yea maybe most of the renderers will be faster than mantra.
Rendering complex shots with a ton of features like that…
(rendered in mantra)
…and compare with other renderers will give you different results about speed of the individual render engines.
What is speed? For me its much more important to have features that will help me to get the job rendered at all. There are so many things to take into account if you compare renderes…
For an interior archviz shot maybe I will rather switch to vray cause I know it will handle this particular shot a little bit better.
On the other hand I rendered shots with mantra that took ages to render them with vray.
Check that breakdown e.g.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D5Qw9TTZTKE
All of it rendered with mantra. Not so much renderers are flexibel enough to manage that massive amount of data at all. Which reduces their speed to zero.
Ask the people from mainroad post if mantra is slow 🙂 Im interested in what they will say about it.
Regarding cycles in Blender I totally agree. Why not have it as an option? It doesn´t hurt right? You have the option to use it or not.
Jon
This is the key:
I agree with you about the slow/fast things, each render engine has it´s pros and cons, so this is a very good thing, you can mix Mantra and Cycles wherever you need and leverage both pros, minimize the cons, and have all your rendering pipeline unified inside Houdini, no matter if the animation or other parts of your pipeline happens in Blender.
But it does not matter to you if yo don’t like the idea, and that´s good, the important thing is that there are people that likes the idea and like Cycles and this is getting done, no need for you to use it thought 🙂
Oh John, dont let my oversimplification reaction on an internet forum trigger you. 🙂 Totally agree with you. I know some studios rendering complex shots in mantra and do the job as the best. As you said is depending of what you are rendering. For a lot of simplier motiongraphics, simple Indirect lighting illumination of clean spaces mantra is very slow compared with others, for more complex shots can be as fast or more than others. And the overall quality of a renderer is not only about speed we all know that if we work in production shots. Its just… Well every renderer has pros and cons, and having more options (and totally free) should embraced as an excellent contribution to the community.
Yea you´re right 🙂 Maybe that was a little much.
My sweet mantra 😉
Hehehe we all feel passionate about our tool of choice, we’ve spent countless hours mastering it and a lot of times we feel it somewhat part of our identity (is kind of our geeky sport 🙂 ), Mantra is absolutely great, I think the discussion was abstracted around a less complex kind of scene, but it is worth noting that indeed not only Mantra is perfect for some scenarios, but also it can render anything you throw at it!
Let’s say you have a very capable lighting TD that needs to light 13 shots (with some variations, why not?) for an spot and is working on a Blender based environment, with this workflow you can theoretically use LOPS to proceduralize your lookDev and layout work and seamlessly port your work to blender via USD to render in how many cycles nodes you want, also, if you compare costs for render farms on Cycles to anything else as far as I’ve seen they are soooo much cheaper, another use case would be to have many artists finalizing assets with Cycles materials and porting them to a lighting scene “description” in LOPS to paralellize the work without leaving a Blender based environment, that is huge!
And…. Mantra is amaaaazingly capable and precise, specially for volumes and memory management, but it’s sooo slow.
in terms of mantra there was a note from a studio where they made a baking setup for mantra that made the render time in minutes range for studio scenes. but i don’t know how they done it. (FMX talk 2020 with Jeff wagner)