mandrake0
I'm not sure if it makes sense when LOP is in houdini? You also get free render nodes and all functions are in one package.
You pointed out the right thing.
Additionally TOPs seems similar to Clarisse Builder.
So it seems for me that we will get QuasiClarisseBuilder engine in Houdini by SideFX. I guess it will be better for lighter/look-dev guys. When I used Clarisse in production it crashed in every five minutes or so, it was quite frustrating, despite the original goal of the devs was to get away from sw related frustrations.
I don't know how things are going there now, because I completely phased out Clarisse, and I don't want to explain my negative experiences more, I was a big fan of Clarisse then and we had a good relationship with Isotropix. Guys are nice there and I absolutely appreciate the “by artists for artists” stuff, but I'm not the only person who thinks that something went wrong after the 2.0.
Houdini has daily builds and seems much more stable for me, which is, I think, one of or maybe the most underappreciated “feature” of a CG software. H isn't perfect I should say and originally isn't for lighting/lookdev, but LOPs, TOPs, USD/Renderman XPU are coming, and I think it's still better to wait for the scene translate after hitting the render button, than exporting/importing manually all the time from H to C.
If you learn how to use Houdini in a Clarisse-ish way (it's possible at some extent, like this:
https://vimeo.com/286184417 [
vimeo.com] ), it's even more handy: ie packed primitives for scattering, then you have the much more versatile toolset for controlling all the aspects of the scattering, Shading Layers = Material Style Sheets (again, more opportunities + Redshift handles MSS for a while now) etc.
In a big VFX/animation studio they have pipeline tools and specific people for specific tasks - this is the niche of Clarisse. Actually they flagged Clarisse Bulder with something like: for big studios only (I don't know why…).