What is a common 3rd party Renderer used with Houdini? I know how to use Mental Ray and Vray in 3D Max. Is Mental Ray common in Houdini? Or something else?

Also, I hope it supports GI, yes?

The most common thrid party renderer by far is PRMan. I've been told it's possible now to integrate just about any third party renderer using SOHO, Houdini's python binding for rendering, but I haven't looked into it myself. Mental Ray is supported by Houdini.

The question is though, why not use Mantra? Mantra is as capable if not more capable than any third party renderer you could want to use and with the tight integration with the rest of Houdini's tools you've got a pretty compelling reason not to choose a third party renderer over Mantra.

But does Mentra support GI? Also I've noticed Mentra renders pretty slowly. Im not sure if my settings needed work (left them at default when I did my first test render) and it took awhile just to render 1 box and 1 light.

Yes, it supports GI, photon mapping, raytracing and Physically Based Rendering. I also wouldn't judge it's performance on a box and a light; it's a general purpose renderer than has programmable shaders and rather open architecture so it's won't usually have the sheer speed of renderer which is built in a more closed or specialized way. Rather give it a heavier scene and you'll see that it is has consistent performance for production scenes.

Teriander
But does Mentra support GI? Also I've noticed Mentra renders pretty slowly. Im not sure if my settings needed work (left them at default when I did my first test render) and it took awhile just to render 1 box and 1 light.

You really can't judge any render engine based on such a experience. More likely you estimated frame buffer speed (and yes, mplay has recently some issues with communicating with mantra on Windows machines which cause some delay when starting render).


As Jason said Mantra has all sugars you wish. It's just not designed similar to V-Ray or others which must response fast for “box and two lights” scenes . Needs your attention. It is supposed to be like that. The goal is to be flexible and powerful, not just fast.

Try a hard scene with displace, motion blur, lots of textures and instances, you'll see all you old friends far behind your back!

cheers,
sy.

This slowness with simple scenes is why i dont consider Houdini/Mantra yet for my broadcast work.

Generaly my scenes render at about 5-30s per frame in XSI/Mental ray. Main content being rotating cell phones, 3d lettering, simple ribbons, etc. All this is mixed up in afx afterwards for a final product.

In my expirinence mantra needs about 15s just to start up under windows xp 32.

When and if i get to work on film projects, maybe this difference will be void. Until then…

Have you ever considered that you have an issue with mantra/mplay and your hardware/OS? I have two machines: Windows and Linux one and I have the same problem as yours on one of them and none of such a problem on second one. Guess which one is which? This conversation has nothing to do with a speed of rendering in mantra engine.

I agree that mantra still lacks of shaders suitable for many of modern TV/design/architecture work. It's is also far more difficult to set up it correctly But this doesn't mean that mantra is slow. It's fast like a hell… Faster then mental for sure.

Agreed with the Mantra peeps. I only use Mantra and have never had a need for anything else so far.

The only way to test a renderer's speed is to render to a file on disk. No other comparison is fair. Especially with Houdini/Mplay because Mplay takes quite a long time to start up, the first time you start it especially.

In my test, on a single CPU, a single box, grid and a light took 3 seconds to render when I render to disk…

Cheers,

peter B

el_diablo
Generaly my scenes render at about 5-30s per frame in XSI/Mental ray. Main content being rotating cell phones, 3d lettering, simple ribbons, etc. All this is mixed up in afx afterwards for a final product.

For many jobs I have the same requirements and Mantra-to-disk is fast as a bullet.

Dragos

Ok, I'll whip up a sample scene. I have some old cell phone models. I'll post both Houdini and XSI 6.5 scene.

Maybe I get some knowledge about Mantra out of this .

the goal of every single work,is a good render. lot of us are lack of how to use mantra efficiently. it is abaout the time for a nice tutorial.

I think time for a big fat book more likely. How applicable are actually renderman books to mantra?

Renderman books are very applicable with regards to the Renderman Shading Language, which is very similar to VEX.

Renderman books are not very applicable where they talk about RIB, as the IFD format is almost totally different, although conceptually similar.

I learned most of my VEX shading stuff by looking at PRman shaders and books Oh, and talking to lots of people more clever than me helped too

Cheers,

Peter B