Hi, I'm working on some groom for a student short animation and I'm stuck on how to render everything. We've been working with maya vray for the environment and one of the main characters and houdini for the other lion main character and are now a bit confused. Whenever I import the fur into maya from houdini, it takes way too long to load so rendering the fur in maya is almost out of the equation unless there's a more efficient way to go about it.

Is it more efficient to import everything into Houdini and use one of the renderers that it supports (i.e. mantra or renderman)? Or would it be possible to use vray in Maya for most of the objects (like we're used to) and then try and replicate the lighting conditions in Houdini to render using another renderer (as vray is not supported in Houdini).

Thanks!

If you can export the hair as Alembic curves from Houdini, you should be able to directly reference that Alembic file with a VRay Proxy Loader. That way Maya's garbage viewport and Alembic plugin don't have to get involved at all… VRay will stream the geometry from disk at rendertime. You can assign shaders and all that like you normally would.

This is perfect! Thank you so much!!