Has anyone gotten Octane to work with Houdini 19 on OSX 12.01? I get crashes even with loading their demo scenes and consistent crashes with trying to use it in Houdini. At least on my Mac Pro, it doesn't seem ready for prime time.

Check the otoy forum. there you can ask the developers.
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=140&t=75411&sid=cd41477c6600a588bb35b8db225e9393&start=1000 [render.otoy.com]
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=101&t=78906 [render.otoy.com]

Unfortunately the otoy forums do not allow posts outside the demo forum. I signed up for the paid version but get one year free for a Mac Pro, but that apparently does not count. The posts on the forum are fairly old and the replies are "we are working on it". I've submitted a bug report but got a reply that gives broken links. The standalone version does work and is fast, but it adds complexity to work outside of Houdini.

Mantra is beautiful and powerful but a little slow. Karma is a bit buggy. 3Dlight is pretty good, but really not faster (and is a CPU rendering engine) when one has equivalent render settings and not as powerful as Mantra (but at least uses mild tweaks to Houdini lights). It is hard to match materials in 3Dlight to Mantra's, unlike Arnold which is almost identical for the same settings. Arnold has nice renders and is a bit faster, but requires recreating lights and materials, is limited to production builds of Houdini (and specific to the build) and has a few minor issues of requiring materials to be added before not after merge nodes to avoid render glitches. I haven't tried Redshift, but don't mind paying for a GPU rendering engine if it is both fast and stable.

Whats also a option could be USD export to blender / cycles x / luxcore (if it works).

Sadly I can't tell whats the best solution for your situation.

Exports to Blender or Modo work well, as does tolerating the slowness of Mantra. I was hoping for a workable GPU rendering option within Houdini though.

Well mantra is End of Life (EOL).
Karma is the way to go but on a osx you only can get cpu rendering. The karma gpu alpha version needs nvidia gpu's to work.

The intel one api could give nativ support to intel gpu and ARM cpu's. But it is not ready what i have read.

At the moment only octane, redshift and cyclesX are using the metal api. More to come.

Island
Has anyone gotten Octane to work with Houdini 19 on OSX 12.01? I get crashes even with loading their demo scenes and consistent crashes with trying to use it in Houdini. At least on my Mac Pro, it doesn't seem ready for prime time.

A few things:

1. Are you running other 3rd party render engines like Renderman? Sometimes that can be a problem.

2. Did you check with Octane that Monterey is ok as an OS?

3. What GPU are you running on?

4. Rohan Dalvi has a series of good tutorials on Octane in Houdini, also the Entagma guys use Octane as well. While not MacOS specific, there are a lot of people who are running Octane in Houdini without issues.

5. I always say this, but in my experience 9 times out of 10 hard crashes can be traced to file write permission issues where an app is trying to write some cache file or other and it can't.

Yes, the problem appears to be octane and Monterey. Otoy has pulled the Houdini plug-in download. The standalone version of octane crashed 12.01 but appears to be quick and stable in 12.1. The enterprise version did not come with the demo scenes that are in the standard version, but it was quick and painless to create my own scene with lights and materials. That worked. Unfortunately the production build of Houdini was fine in 12.01 but glacially slow in 12.1, but that appears to be fixed in the daily build. At least for me, this is not a file permission or graphics card issue. I do like not having to rebuild shaders and lights when I use engines other than Mantra or Karma, but that isn't a huge issue.

Same set of issues here. No usable solution for h19 and any renderer except mantra atm due to a combo of problems.
I use vray and redshift primarily and these companies are very fast to reply and also do things to fix issues. Recommend these (but absolutely not vray gpu) .

That said, for production you should probably stay on 18.5, and a stable OS like windows 10.

Have you tried 3Delight?

Yes! Was hoping for 3dl. Sadly I Have not found a working combo on h19 yet. H19.0.455 is totally broken on mac and currebt 3dl doesn’t work on 383. Best working right now is 383 with RS and vray. On the topic of octane, I really like the output and flexibility of the renderer but the way they overhype the product and lie to their customers is so bad that it would warrant lawsuits.

FWIW -- I'm currently working and rendering in .455 with 3dl (most recent update) with no crashes or any issues. As a matter of fact I have a Windows workstation set up too, and Houdini is far more flimsy in that environment than on my Mac. Having said that, I'm also still on Big Sur for my main machine (although I have Houdini on my laptop running Monterey and that has also been very solid).

So here's another factor that might be at play -- SideFX decided with H19 to default the download version of Houdini to Python 3, whereas many 3rd party render engines like 3dl (and possibly Octane) still prefer to run on Python 2. 3dl downright won't launch in H19/455 py3 but will 100% work with H19/455 py2.

So yeah...maybe give Python 2 a try?

3Dlight works fine on my computer but really isn't any faster than Mantra when the scene gets complex. It has a nice car paint shader but I don't see any major advantage over what is built in to Houdini. Regarding Octane: I have gotten replies from Otoy and the standalone version does work with Monterey on my computer. However the Houdini plugin not only is not certified under Moneterey and is only in development for Big Sur but also is set up for Houdini version 18.0-18.5 (three different directories). Probably I should give Redshift a try, but I've given Maxon more money than they deserve.

Anyone got Octane to work in Houdini 19.5 on MacOS?

Midphase
Anyone got Octane to work in Houdini 19.5 on MacOS?

Yep, at least on Apple Silicon (M1), it works exceptionally well.