Chrizto I think SideFX will loose A LOT of customers if Indie Customers are forced into using only Mantra and not standalone or plugin 3rd party renderers…
(Mantra is a great renderer, but it's as old as most people in here's moms (not as old as my mom though)… :roll:
the concept of mantra with vex was and is the way to go. because vex gets compiled with llvm it's just a matter of time till it get's a opencl support and then a lot of nodes will be also gpu supported on the fly. i hope that opencl 2.0 will be the api that can be used for vex but i'm not 100% sure. you also can see that the last couple of years all efforts for new nodes in houdini has shifted to vex, only the core nodes and functions are c++.
btw. opensl uses also llvm for the compilation of the shader code so it's today the way to go. not bad for a mom :-)
I've worked as a software developer using C++ for many years and lately also used alot of LLVM. This does not mean that thing's are “just around the corner”.
I love Mantra! Vex is also very powerful, and a lot like doing a strange form of C programming or something, so I'm a happy camper… C was my first language.
“If your life is not NOW, you're already dead…” From Chrizto's book of truths