My setup:

- 1 Houdini FX workstation license (with 5 Karma tokens)
- 2 PCs: one used as my main workstation, and the other intended for rendering

My situation:
I’m not a technical artist, and I’m the only Houdini user in my company. So I’m trying to figure out how to use my second PC for rendering while continuing to work on my main machine with little to no knowledge.

I’ve found very little documentation that I can either find or understand on how to set this up. Topics like HQueue or Husk feel completely alien to me, and I haven’t been able to find any step-by-step guides that explain the process in a beginner-friendly way.
On top of that, my company has multiple layers of firewall restrictions and internal procedures for installing software, setting up servers, or even opening a terminal (for example, sending an IP address from my main PC to the second PC).

My question:
Given these constraints, does anyone have advice on the simplest or most practical way to use my extra PC for rendering?

Thank you!

One pretty easy solution is Deadline. (https://docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/products/deadline/10.4/1_User%20Manual/manual/index-introduction-to-deadline.html) It is free nowadays for less the x computers and it is not too complicated to setup and has a good feature-set imho.

If you get it working, please make a tutorial!

w_maro
If you get it working, please make a tutorial!

Seriously? Maybe on a mixed farm with different kinds of OS, but i've had nothing but walks in the park when installing this. Granted, i've been using it for well over 15 years now, from when it was still thinkbox software, so maybe I've grown accustomed to it, but iirc it is as simple as installing executables on windows where the whole process of making a mongo db is done step by step and explained well in the documentation.
What part are you struggling with?

Nah, Deadline definitely has pitfalls for new users. Some off the top of my head:
- you need to know the basics of sharing folders over a network
- you need to know that during the installation you can skip security certificates if you want to, or alternatively know how to then authenticate using them
- you need to know how to connect to the repository (direct connection vs RCS, the latter requiring an extra install if i recall)
And that's just the start
- then you need to know how to install Houdini submitters from the repo
- how to manually add newer Houdini versions that aren't supported
- finally, bonus chaos points if you haven't ever actually used Deadline before and don't know how it's supposed to work
And then there's the whole topic of licenses when rendering with Houdini.exe or Husk.exe, where Deadline does not ship with a custom Husk plugin/submitter.

If you know the answers, it's pretty trivial, but if you don't it's definitely paralyzing. I'm a Deadline fan, but I wonder if Hqueue wouldn't maybe be a little simpler here. I've never used it though.

Can do a big thumbs up for HQueue. I used Google Gemini to help set it up, plus a lot of old fashioned googling. There's a great video on YouTube about it too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=838z9v17ThI [www.youtube.com]

My use case is I have four machines: one being a workstation running Linux (CachyOS), a Win 11 desktop, an Ubuntu Server, and an Ubuntu Server VM on my 64 core Threadripper running Proxmox.

The Ubuntu VM hosts the HQ Server and is a client with GPU pass thru. Files are mapped cross platform so my Windows machine picks up just fine from my Linux jobs. They all render and simulate concurrently with no issues.

That being said, there are a lot of quirks to getting it working. I basically did all of this while also learning Linux and there were times it was a PAIN. Be prepared to spend a weekend or two to really get it figured out.

Like I said, Gemini (and sometimes Claude, though I found more success with Gemini) is very helpful in finding answers to random issues, like when you get an error in your HQueue log, and the AI helps you find out which part of Linux is borked, etc.

All that to say: I think HQueue is a solid choice, if not the best choice, for running a Houdini-only job management system. We use Deadline at the studio I'm at and it's really great for a lot of things, but I think it's hugely overkill for a two machine environment where Houdini is the only thing you'll be using it for.

use HQueue with TOPS, I doubt you ever need more than that.

The IT restriction and firewall side of this is worth addressing directly since the other replies focus more on the tool choices than the network constraint.

If your company's IT policies prevent you from opening ports or installing server software without approval, HQueue is the easier path here — it needs fewer prerequisites than Deadline (no MongoDB, no repository, no certificate management) and SideFX's own documentation covers the install. Given you're Houdini-only, the HQueue + TOPS combination that others mentioned is a reasonable starting point.

For the network share problem: if both PCs are on the same Windows domain, you almost certainly already have SMB access available without opening anything new. Map the project directory as a network drive on both machines. That sidesteps the "I can't open a terminal to send an IP" issue — it's just a shared folder, same as any mapped drive your office already uses.

One practical shortcut worth knowing: you can export a USD cache from your workstation, put it on that shared drive, and run Husk on the second PC pointing at the USD file directly. Husk is a standalone executable — your IT team installs one small program, not a full Houdini seat. No GUI license needed on the render node.