Using redshift these days as my main renderer and I'm very happy with its speed!

I have noticed a big slowdown however when using Hqueue. When I render from within Houdini I get 2 to 3 seconds per frame, submitting via Hqueue I get about 13 to 14 seconds per frame. Still very very fast, but that seems like a huge slow down! (Using Houdini Indie if that makes a difference)

I suspect it's because Hqueue opens and closes an instance of Houdini per frame. I've already got Hqueue using a local install of Houdini (as opposed to a network location).

I'm just using a render node to process these and while I could just manually render each scene from within Houdini, it'd be nice to have them all queued up so I don't have to start each one after the other has finished.

Is there a way to have hqueue keep the instance of Houdini open to render a whole sequence rather than open/close per frame? (assuming that's what's happening)

Thanks!

The3DStig
Using redshift these days as my main renderer and I'm very happy with its speed!

I have noticed a big slowdown however when using Hqueue. When I render from within Houdini I get 2 to 3 seconds per frame, submitting via Hqueue I get about 13 to 14 seconds per frame. Still very very fast, but that seems like a huge slow down! (Using Houdini Indie if that makes a difference)

I suspect it's because Hqueue opens and closes an instance of Houdini per frame. I've already got Hqueue using a local install of Houdini (as opposed to a network location).

I'm just using a render node to process these and while I could just manually render each scene from within Houdini, it'd be nice to have them all queued up so I don't have to start each one after the other has finished.

Is there a way to have hqueue keep the instance of Houdini open to render a whole sequence rather than open/close per frame? (assuming that's what's happening)

Thanks!

Are you loading Houdini from the distro folder, and is it somewhere on a network drive?
You can point the submitter to you local installation then.
Also bear in mind that HQueue starts Houdini fresh for every single frame which is not the case when you render from inside the application. Not very efficient and you can not create chunk of frames or anything like in a real Renderfarm.

How did you get redshift to work with HQueue?

bradcarvey
How did you get redshift to work with HQueue?

You need an engine license and make sure that the RS install has the right plugins. Also make sure the .env file has the plugin information.

You can also toggle on “batch all frames together,” (I don't recall the exact name of the parm) in the hqueue node. That way it only opens Houdini once… of course you don't get the benefit of distributed rendering then. You could always chain a few ROPs together with a chunk of the frame range each to mimic customisable batch size in Hqueue, (hm, that's a good RFE).