The guys at Solid Iris are looking to integrate Thea Render into some more software. Please consider taking a minute to vote for Houdini in their poll and maybe we can get another third party render engine available to us.

http://www.thearender.com/cms/ [thearender.com]

For those of you unfamiliar with Thea it's a hybrid biased, unbiased GPU renderer. It's very fast and very nice.

would be interesting when the thea studio will have the houdini engine build in like that they are getting support for alembic, fbx and some other goodies.

There are plans for Alembic in Thea in the future but obviously an integrated version would be much better. There just needs to be the interest from the community.

That's should be great if Houdini will support it