Hi,
Im interested to hear who is using Mantra at their facility for lighting / rendering currently and if your not using it, whats holding you back ! .

Rob

yea.

Method Vancouver uses it for FX work and some hard surface stuff. Almost the whole bridge fire sequence at the end of Abe Lincoln: Vampire Hunter was Mantra (except the engine I believe)

Main thing: Mantra isn't available from Maya… plus the out-of-box experience with Houdini/mantra lighting is lacking particularly lack of useful shaders/materials/presets.

If you have resources you can fix a lot of it but for a mid/smaller studio it's just faster and easier to light in Maya/Vray or Maya/MR even.

For FX heavy stuff, Mantra is a no-brainer and very respected.

We are a very small shop (core team 4 people and 2-3 freelancers) and we are using mantra for everything we do from product vis to motion graphics and (since last month) characters.
There are several key arguments to this:

- unlimited rendering licenses included
- flexiblity (vex/vops and different renderers reyes/rt/pbr)
- integration into Houdini (which cannot be matched by maya/vray or max/vray)
- point cloud baking
- fur and volumetrics
- IPR (I know VRAY has RT but everyone keeps telling me how badly it works)
- etc.

I would go as far as saying that especially BECAUSE we are such a small team that Houdini + Mantra empowers us to do things we would not be able to do with another Package + Renderer combination. Everything just works and is very flexible.

Of course there's more TD work to be done but with time you build a library of shaders and tools that you can use and that speed up the process.

There are however also some things that I would really love to see to make the experience even better:

- flexible GI caching mechanisms
- adaptive DMC sampler like in vray
- out of the box point procedural like krakatoa


P.S.: We only have a VERY limited renderfarm at our disposal and still managed to always render everything in time which shows that mantra is not as slow as it is often said.

Best,
Dennis

Yes, where I work it's used to render FX elements (isnt that expected?), occasionally whole jobs.

dennis.weil
- out of the box point procedural like krakatoa

Could you expand on that? I've never used Krakatoa. It's a point and volume renderer, right? What can it do that Houdini/Mantra can't?

We are small (2 + several freelancers), young studio, PiXateCreative. We just bought Houdini license for upcoming works. We were using Modo for most of our work previously. Right now we have larger jobs and Modo just could not handle all of that.

Main reason we choose to grow along side Houdini is that we can fit Houdini to our present workflow and later fit anything else to it, as easy as possible. We are preparing most of assets in Modo and it is plugged perfectly to Houdini. Also factors like:

- unlimited render nodes
- ultra flexibility
- better licensing system comparing to Autodesk

were really important for us to decide.

Would like to have a bit faster GI when doing interior renderings. At this point we will continue to use Modo for this type of work. Until there are more enhancements in Mantra (speed up, more GI solutions) or some 3rd party render engine arrives (Vray, Arnold). We also plan to implement our own connection to some 3rd party render engines next year.

We are going to buy more license next year for sure, as soon as guys we are collaborate with gain more Houdini knowledge. And SESI did great work by supplying new learning materials in last several months.

we use Mantra for everything, it's by far my favourite render engine

In gaming , we generally do not bother too much with software renderers. However, many procedural asset generation systems we have been building use many aspect of mantra to do many different things, such as texture bakes, renders for front end and marketing, etc.

When it comes to generate game asset bakes of any sort, to service any realtime shader, NO ONE, I repeat, NO ONE, can touch mantra and VOPs (its one of the main, yet less known, advantages of Houdini for gaming)

These [human-ark.com] guys are using Mantra for 99% of the work, and these [alvernia.com] for effects work and these [platige.com] for furry work.

People are not using Mantra, because they are not using Houdini. Switch from Maya to Houdini just for rendering is far from obvious (assuming Houdini license is available) , not because it's not worth a try (it is), but because current state of Houdini in that department is messy and potential advantages unclear. SESI would have to clean up issues with takes, categories, bundles, properties hierarchies, spreadsheet, layered shaders, and bring Arnold on board to make it potentially clearer for people outside this sandbox.

I see Maya artists squealing hopefully about Katana in a studios they have access to Houdini licenses, but not willing to try it out. They hate render in Maya, but don't even consider Houdini, which (un)obviously brings a lot from what Katana does.

Selling Houdini Light for 1K$ (float), with nothing but /obj /cops /shops and some subset of sops would be beneficial, but this is a route SESI abandoned long time ago. Focusing on effects apparently has brought some benefits too.

http://www.axisanimation.com/ [axisanimation.com]

Check out the work we're doing for Halo 4
All rendered in Mantra

All rendered in Mantra, amazing!

I have only good things to say about Mantra as a render engine.

My reservations or questions are more in regard to scene management in Houdini itself. Particularly, how you guys handle really heavy scenes (lots of objects) with potentially many passes and overrides etc? I should say that I've only ever really done FX work in Houdini, so have only been rendering a few elements and mattes at a time, so setting up passes is pretty easy and powerful (I tend to use a combination of subnets of instances with Take overrides).

I otherwise do rendering in XSI, where the system of passes and partitions with overrides is really powerful, if a little rigid. Perhaps if one were coming from Maya, Houdini is a real step up for pass management?

But, I find the prospect of managing a few hundred or thousand objects with many passes and overrides to be very daunting in H. Perhaps because there are so many ways to do this, but no “right” way. Each method or combination thereof has advantages and problems as far as I can tell. There's no clearly defined workflow, so do you guys make one with custom tools? Or is my apprehension unwarranted?

Hope this isn't too OT!

carlov
http://www.axisanimation.com/ [axisanimation.com]

Check out the work we're doing for Halo 4
All rendered in Mantra

wow!

I certainly have a few RFE's in with SESI to the make the experience out of the box just that bit better. Mantra is certainly capable and out of the box a lot easier than renderman. Ive just come off a job using renderman and the workflow to get an image out was anything but easy.

Rob