Hi,

i'm relativly new to houdini, as an industrial designer I'm using StudioTools for modelling and rendering. Now I would like to get into a real high end render and animation packaging. i downloaded the great apprentice version, i like the GUI a lot..looks very logical and very well structered!

I would like to now how good the mantra renderer is for photorealistic product visulization? makes it any sense to try to get into houdini if my aim is mainly doing nice, still renderings? or would maya with mental ray be the better opt?

would RenderMan be a better choice? maybe 3delight that is free? how diffcult is it to setup 3delight to work with houdini?

Can houdini import IGs files?

thanks to all of you!

my first thought is NO. mental ray is far more usable for that kind of work. faster, with better pre made shaders…
but as a houdini lover I would also say why not, learn, practice and try… people here managed to make some beautiful renderings with mantra… so it is possible for sure

I guess mental ray is too expensive for me at the moment. so one option could be softimage…but i like this idea of using houdini! is there any gossip about a new render engine in houdini 9? so far i just found some discussions about a new (or improved) GUI.

Is Renderman an Alternative? I can't bring my version to use the 3delight installed on my PC (win XP pro) to use it…are there any tutorials or special parts in the online help how to set up an renderman pipeline?

regards

The rumor is that it's gonna be lots of improvements in mantra also. In fact this is something I would expect from SESI knowing this company a bit. Keep in mind although that Houdini/mantra is targeted on movie industry mostly and from that point of view not all “urgent” VIZ features are really important. This would be a waste of development time to follow this way as none of Houdini serious user is really waiting for this.

There is coming also this if you are really interested:
http://sunflow.sourceforge.net/phpbb2/viewtopic.php?t=280&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=houdini&start=15 [sunflow.sourceforge.net]
cheers,
sy.

PS I've also heard that H9. will export scene description to some interoperability format (XML?) to make life easer in that way at least.

lukasdesign
Is Renderman an Alternative? I can't bring my version to use the 3delight installed on my PC (win XP pro) to use it…are there any tutorials or special parts in the online help how to set up an renderman pipeline?

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=6444 [sidefx.com]