for running houdini,what advantage features… does Linux have compare to windows7？

Windows is more common, and easier to set up for a single user.

Linux is better in a larger studio environment, and is around 10-15% faster on the same hardware as Windows.

I run both, Windows on my laptop, Linux on my “workstation” at home, and at work.

Cheers,

Peter B

I find compiling extra plugins in the HDK a lot easier on linux as well as you can use the free compiler. On windows Visual Studio is the only way and you can't compile without the full version for 64 bit.

On linux you can automate tasks a lot easier with shell scripts/python. This is more the stuff you do next to houdini, like batch renaming files, triggering pre and post render scripts, rendering ifd files.

Of course on windows you can buy (or program) little programs that do it for you as well, but I find you have much more flexibility with linux.

Also.. most bigger studios are on linux, so you might as well learn it.

I dual boot windows 7 and ubuntu 10.04 at home, fedora at work. Houdini on linux feels faster and more responsive, I don't know what affects it exactly. It could be because of the inter-process communication that takes longer/is different on windows (this would be between houdini and mantra, houdini and mplay). Perhaps it is simply because I do not have much else running on Linux and therefore more system resources are available.

This is a guess: but I think linux is the main sesi development platform. (Hqueue came out first on linux for example), and then the code is ported to other platforms.

All excellent points Peter, though Cygwin on Windows is free and offers all the automation that I need on Windows

Completely agree about HDK compiling, I'd forgotten about that.

Cheers,

Peter B

that's great！ thank you all !

and will you please tell me some example when and how to use pre and post render scripts.

In pre render script you can for instance enable/disable certain objects in your scene before rendering, or while on cygwin/linux build create a complete new folder structure reflecting your ROPs naming convention. In the post render script you could take a rendered sequence and convert it to another format (jpg prevs of pic/rat seq) or create a quicktime using ffmpeg tool etc.