Hi all. I am both a normal Houdini user and an apprentice user and also an apprentice user of Derivative Touch's FTE product (Greg Hermanovic's software). It shares similarities with Houdini as an earlier version of Houdini was its predecessor. I have a question about rendering in both packages.

There is a Derivative tutorial where they render particles as sprites on the fly in the Compositor in Touch. In Houdini if I were to render to the COP engine and try to display this in the GUI, the playback is not smooth–it skips frames trying to cook. But in Touch it seems that you can render directly to the compositor (COP) and the playback is frame-per-frame smooth (if you have a simple scene).

Is there a general way that people can work with realtime playback of frames in the compositor? (While I ask this question I will attempt to render frames and load them back into the compositor post-rendering and see if the compositor has realtime playback of rendered frames.)

It appears that treating Houdini's COP engine like a flipbook and loading pre-rendered images into a file COP allows realtime playback (of simple images, and images that aren't too long in sequence). This makes it like the RAM Preview of After Effects. But I am wondering why Touch Designer allows realtime rendering AND playback within the interface of simple scenes (the tutorial was a particle tutorial). They were able to simulate an itunes-type visualization in real-time. The reason I am concerned with this is if I were to use Houdini to play back a scene that has not been rendered but will render on the fly after importing it into a gaming engine like Torque. I may be way off base. (I guess video games use prerendered images also and just choose from a matrix of image libraries to display character motion and scene interactivity). Anyone with insight please chime in to help me understand how this works.

I can't really speak for Touch, though it is designed from the ground-up as an interactive, realtime app. Houdini is designed with more emphasis on operators and capability (HDR images, deep rasters, etc).

You can allocate more memory to the COP image cache by opening the Cache Manager (Windows->Cache Manager) and typing a larger value into the Image Cache. It's set to a very low value by default (10MB) to preserve memory for the rest of the system, as generally flipbooks are used to preview in realtime.

Hello,

I am very new to Houdini and Touch and just came across this thread (which is a bit old by now)..

My question is, would the new Houdini Engine [sidefx.com] change anything in the real-time performance - e.g. when running a particle or physics simulation (not pre-baked) within Houdini Engine (e.g. in Unity). Or would the speed of calculation and rendering be still similar as when playing directly in Houdini (e.g. if houdini engine is more like a wrapper)?

Meaning could I achieve similar real-time performance of effects/animations/physics with houdini-engine (running within a game engine like Unity or Unreal or Torque) as I could with Touch, or what would be the differences?

Thank you!

Cheers,
Leander

lschock
Hello,

I am very new to Houdini and Touch and just came across this thread (which is a bit old by now)..

My question is, would the new Houdini Engine [www.sidefx.com] change anything in the real-time performance - e.g. when running a particle or physics simulation (not pre-baked) within Houdini Engine (e.g. in Unity). Or would the speed of calculation and rendering be still similar as when playing directly in Houdini (e.g. if houdini engine is more like a wrapper)?

Meaning could I achieve similar real-time performance of effects/animations/physics with houdini-engine (running within a game engine like Unity or Unreal or Torque) as I could with Touch, or what would be the differences?

Thank you!

Cheers,
Leander

Did you find any answers ? Im also looking for a solution to realtime fx with houdini engine to unreal