There's been several discussions around the Net about adding 3rd Party support to Indie at an increased price point.

Can anyone from SideFx chime in?

For $99 extra you get Houdini Engine, which bypasses the render size restriction anyway AND opens it up to 3rd party rendering.

The engine license is included with your Indie license. No need to spend the extra $99. Direct support inside of Houdini would be nice for sure but at least with the engine you can use it as a bridge to render with your engine of choice in another DCC app.

RedShift 3D is in Alpha for Houdini. Houdini + RedShift is a Indie dream come true.

An Indie cant afford $4.5k for that dream.

On second thought….it becomes increasingly difficult to police the Indie render output restrictions for 3rd party rendering. That's probably the deal breaker for Indie.

You could never really fully lock it down I suppose…via some Host DCC code.

Maybe, just maybe, if the 3rd party renderers would fork a codebase that enforces the output restrictions, and only works with Indie.

I wonder if SideFx would approve something like that?

edit: …or SideFx could create a biased, GPU accelerated version of Mantra?

#DontWakeMeImDreaming

Okay, thank you SESI for doing this for the 3D community! This is a fantastic move to level the playing field.

We will be adding 3rd party rendering in H15.5 - no added cost:

http://sidefx.co/indierender [sidefx.co]

Please support Maxwell too.

Best news ever!!!!

Insert the “300” - ‘This is SideFX!!’ meme image ;-P

But awesome news!!

Massive thanks to all at Houdini!!

rob
holland

Aaand here you go.

Hello,

I read that Houdini Indie will send the scene information directly to the third party renderer without intermediate steps. Will this prevent to render using such third-party renderers on a pay-per-minute remote cloud farm service?

I'm considering to switch to Houdini after I read about the third party rendering support in Indie but I would need to be able to send my render jobs to cloud services.

Thanks