Peteski just recently posted a question about network rendering with Indie.

As my learning curve with Houdini is still in other areas other than the rendering stage I'm not yet familiar with the ins and outs of the rendering process.

Instead of asking a question that might not be related directly to Peteskis question I thought I would post a new topic about a question I've had for a while.

In the comparison features of the Houdini products there are the unlimited Mantra Tokens, single token ( Indie/Apprentice ) and 10 for education.

I was wondering what Mantra tokens are?

Does having more let you hook up more machines to do your rendering, hence being faster or say I guess the same thing being by being able to take more advantage of render farm service?

Or something like that?

Or is it something strictly related to the Mantra node/s, if used.

In other words if something is using something like Render Man, would having unlimited Mantra tokesn have no effect/use?

Thanks

A Mantra Token is a license for a single computer to render a mantra scene description, it has no bearing on other renderers.

When you click render, Houdini generates an IFD scene, and then feeds that to mantra, which reads it and renders the image. Indie and Apprentice users cannot generate the IFD separately, like Edu and full Commercial licenses can, it all happens for you behind the scenes. You can do batch-style rendering with Houdini Engine Indie, but that's using a full non-gui Houdini license, and not a Mantra token.

So for a farm, you would need one Mantra token for each render job. It's an amazing value that if you buy a single commercial license of Houdini or Houdini FX, you are entitled to unlimited Mantra tokens to fill your farm. It's an incredible value not many folks are aware of.

Thanks for that info goldleaf.