Hi there,

As a newbie using Houdini Apprentice ver. for a couple of weaks, I'd like to know which render engine is used how? I mean when I look into the SHOPs, I see Renderman or Mental Ray shaders more than the built in Mantra renderer's shaders. So, as far as I know, you have to buy Renderman as a standalone app. and through the Renderman shaders in Houdini you can use it as a Render Engine. What if I want to use Mental Ray? Is it installed when I installed Hodini apprentice ver. or how can I use Mental Ray as a rendering engine in Houdini?

Thanks in advance,
Diya.

No, Apprentice only lets you render with mantra, the renderer that comes with Houdini. I've never run Apprentice, but I suspect it was safer(stability-wise) for them to leave all those GUI references to other renderers there rather than trying to strip it out - and they just disabled the actual ability to output those files.

Fear not, though - mantra is a *very* powerful renderer and quite robust. When we started our company, as much as we liked Houdini we chose to go with Renderman for all our production work. However, since v6 we've been making the move and now we're mantra-only. Should you want to get into coding it's quite similar to the Renderman Spec(although there are significant differences!) so it's all very useful in terms of education.

Cheers,

J.C.

Thank you very much for your informing reply, J.C. It's nice to hear the power of the Mantra renderer. Could you explain how is it used with Mental Ray when you buy the full version? Is it purchased with Houdini?

Thanks again,
Diya.

Essentially the full version of Houdini comes with ROPs(Render OPs) that allow you to output not only mantra-renderable files, but also Renderman and Mental Ray too. As you've seen, there's support in various parts of the program for renderer-specific tags and shaders. Wherever possible they made it “invisible” so that common elements that are shared between renderers aren't specifically broken out.

I'm afraid I've never used MR so I can't really give an specific examples , but the upshot is that it's fairly straightforward implementing it into your pipeline…

Cheers,

J.C.

there's some nice examples of mantra's rendering here:

http://odforce.net/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=15&t=1340 [odforce.net]

Thanks again for your reply JC, and thanks for the link mta, I greatly appreciate it.

Best regards,
Diya.