Hi all,
New here. I was just wondering if there was a way around to use one of Amazon's ‘free’ cloud computers to render out Houdini scenes?

http://aws.amazon.com/free/ [aws.amazon.com]

Any help would be great!

Cheers
Jim

I don't know all the details, but here are some resources that you might want to consider:

You can submit render jobs to Amazon’s EC2 compute service easily from within Houdini using the Cloud Properties window and the HQueue Render node.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/render/cloudfarm [sidefx.com]
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/20902-ever-render-with-houdini-in-the-cloud/ [forums.odforce.net]

Chronon
I don't know all the details, but here are some resources that you might want to consider:

You can submit render jobs to Amazon’s EC2 compute service easily from within Houdini using the Cloud Properties window and the HQueue Render node.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/render/cloudfarm [sidefx.com]
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/20902-ever-render-with-houdini-in-the-cloud/ [forums.odforce.net]

Thanks for the reply Chronon. Using the inbuilt nodes sends jobs to servers where you have to pay per hour (at very reasonable prices), but amazon also offer free virtual servers and it would be cool to use these instead.

Well, no free lunches and all that jazz…

The free EC2 thingie gives you 750 free hours on a T2 micro instance, and the hours make it look impressive but the instance is about as powerful as a smartphone, though with less RAM than one, so really not very useful for rendering or simulating on…

You pay additionally for the houdini license on Amazons service so I'm fairly sure the answer to your question is no. I'd be more interested in them upgrading the service they do offer - apparently houdini still uses the older models, but Amazon has faster systems by default now.