Hello,

I'm hoping someone might be able to help me out with my situation…

I use solidworks for product deisign, and I am currently searching for a good workflow to do product renderings, animation, etc.

I would like to use Houdini because I see it as the Solidworks/Parametric equivalent of the entertainment/fx world– I've tried all the autodesk programs, c4d, etc. and nothing makes sense to me like Houdini does. Funny, seeing that it seems to be the other way around with most folks

I also use Rhino, which allows me to export my designs to Octane Render, which is what I currently use for my renderings. I also have experience with vray, which I would be glad to use instead of Octane, but Octane is more affordable to me right now.

The problem I see is that Houdini doesn't seem to support many rendering solutions, or at least not in a way that's accessible to a humble on-man-band artist with no programming experience. I am guessing that the big production houses have it figured out with all sorts of rendering options, but is that achievable for somebody like me?

So, the company I work for wants to buy some software so that I can be more productive with rendering. I would love for it to be Houdini. I'm hoping there is a practical way to use it for what I want. The other option right now is softimage, which I also know how to use, and it works with Octane and Vray, but like I said, I think I can be more powerful with Houdini and it's proceduralism.

Thanks for any tips!

Ian

Why don't you try Mantra? is it necessary to be Octane or Vray?

I guess my perception of mantra is that it would be like using a wrench to drive a nail. Isn't mantra more suited for FX? There sure isn't much evidence on the web of mantra being used for photo-realistic product renderings. I'm sure it can be done, but I think I would have a hard time convincing the guys I work for that it would be worth it for me to learn the ins and outs of a whole new render package, rather than sticking with what I know.

Seems to me that learning mantra would be like learning mental ray, where there would be a boat load of tricks and tweaks I would have to learn to make it do what I want. And I am not discounting the value of that, but I am an “everything” guy in my company. I do design, manufacturing, rendering, marketing, etc., and I think becoming proficient enough to do good looking product viz in something like mantra would be a full time job… or is my perception off?

There certainly is a learning curve, but if you decide for mantra, you'd have unlimited (I think) render nodes for free.
Besides, you can get a decent render quality pretty much out of the box with the mantra surface and PBR. The more you learn though, the more you'll start customizing things.

Cheers

Render nodes for free? Are you implying that in some cases you have to pay to render things in houdini?

No, I'm implying that with most commercial renderers you have to pay for every renderslave in a renderfarm.
If you were to setup a renderfarm to render mantra jobs you only have to own one copy of houdini and all the renderslaves will be free.
I'm just not sure now if you get all the render slaves for free or if it's a limited number like 50 or something…

Cheers

ah, that makes sense. Thanks

….So I'll take the response so far to mean that there's not really a good way to use other render engines with houdini. If I want to use houdini in my product design workflow, then I should use mantra.

Well, buying a Houdini and waiting for someone to write plugin for Octane or Vray would be definitely bad move. What if something like that never happens

Mantra is capable of doing photorealistic renders. Of course it take some time to learn, but with PBR it is much easier to get nice results without too much work and understanding whats happening under the hood.
Turn on PBR, place Env light, HDR, some area lights, tweak samples and that is it. Plus MantraSurface is uber shader that is really easy to figure out if you have some CG background.

Cool. Thanks for helping out, guys. Sounds like I need to spend a weekend and try to reproduce what I can do in Octane with Mantra. See where that takes me.

enthewhite
….So I'll take the response so far to mean that there's not really a good way to use other render engines with houdini. If I want to use houdini in my product design workflow, then I should use mantra.

PRman is builtin and renderman compliant renderers are supposed to be easy to integrate. Mentalray is also there, but I'm not sure about version compatibility. Also once you get your system setup and rendering with mantra, nothing prevents you from learning to script the connection with other renderers!

Cheers

enthewhite
Cool. Thanks for helping out, guys. Sounds like I need to spend a weekend and try to reproduce what I can do in Octane with Mantra. See where that takes me.

Please make sure you read this post by “old school” (post #15)
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/16507-corona-render/page__st__12#entry101045 [forums.odforce.net]

PS. There was also an “archviz” debate on odforce a while back that you might be interested in:
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/15070-demystify-archviz-in-houdini/ [forums.odforce.net]

Just found this post here:

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/15070-demystify-archviz-in-houdini/#entry93030 [forums.odforce.net]

You might be interested in reading…

Cheers

I read most of the comments, and I am upset not seeing a single comment saying, Houdini for product visulisation is over kill. If and if only you are concerned about rendering of static objects , or with limited motion yet speedy renders, less parameter work but more rendering, limited amount of FX work then go with Modo, it is cheaper, it has most of the fx tools, althou of course not even a near match with Houdini and no procedural workflow. but has rigid bodies and particles and fur , comes with an amazing renderer. and it still costs 500 us cheaper than Standart Houdini .

Please dont ban me for advertising another product.