Is there any text that describe the differences between these two renderers? From what I've been able to glean they are very similar, and their toolsets (the Vex builder and Slim) are also comparable in certain ways.

Is there any set of known advantages that they have over eachother with respect to Houdini useage only? Would it be a safe bet that Houdini, despite being RM compliant, is just better of with its own renderer?

Just wondering.. Thanks..

Well, actually, Houdini's prman output is so damned good, you can do pretty well anything in prman as you can with mantra, in terms of driving it with Houdini. Of course, some things are a little more “cooked into the pipeline” with mantra, but up until very recently, we only used prman with Houdini. The RIB output is better and more accessible than anything else I've seen out there.

The prman vs mantra issue is more complicated. Prman's been around for a long time and has been pounded with some pretty severe production constraints. It's damned robust, extremely efficient and fast, and looks really good. Anyway - you probably know all that. I'm not sure what your needs would be - that would drive your choice big-time. No matter which renderer you use, you still need to make lots of tools that can be “punished”. Prman ships with the most basic stuff, as does Houdini - for instance just getting aliased noise out of either isn't as simple as using “noise”. Even “aanoise” in Houdini doesn't cut it. We've started moving over to mantra with v6 - still not there as there's some major chunks needing porting. Mantra is slower(for 95% of the work anyway), but the licenses are far cheaper. Houdini comes with VOPs and OTLs, which are very very neat and can setup the scenario where TDs can write solid VOPs for the shaders to build their own shaders with. Personally, I like the look of the pseudo-area lights in mantra more than in prman. There's a thousand things to compare.

Anything more specific, feel free to ask…

Cheers,

J.C.