
First a bit of background: I've been a 3dsmax user for around 14 years and have now began to learn Houdini over the past couple of weeks. I'm a generalist with focus on lighting/rendering and tool development, so Houdini was the next logical step for me.
With that out of the way I need to say that I'm blown away by what I can do with Mantra, especially shader building, access to everything everywhere and all that in a relatively straight forward way. I've used many different renderers over the years (though mostly vray these days) and I can safely say that mantra has been the most versatile yet.
(Brace yourselfs, now comes the big “BUT”) I know this has certainly been discussed endless times before and some users here will roll their eyes but I think it doesn't hurt to give a little feedback about mantra, even though or especially because I'm coming from a different DCC and business segment. All this versatility is currently little useful to me since I can barely render any production quality images with it. I have been trying to understand how mantra works, how to optimize it, made test renderings in comparison to other renderers I know and own but I just simply can't get its render times into a useful range for me (and if all goes to plan, the studio I'm working for). We use to render a lot in 4k lately, just recently an 11 minutes single camera exterior shot with hundreds of buildings and assets. Long story short: guessing from my tests, the same thing in mantra (instead of vray) would probably take 10 times as long. I definitely can not rule out errors on my side, I may have missed some crucial bit in my tests, but as far as I see it right now, mantra is out of the question as production renderer for us. So why am I writing this? I know there are 3rd party renderers, redshift and arnold foremost (whereas the latter is now owned by autodesk and thus not an option anymore). There will also be a vray for Houdini some time in the future, the version I tested is promising. But still, none of them is as versatile as mantra and I'd really love to use it, the integration and the features are just too good to ignore. The only thing that's holding me back (and others I spoke to) is the speed. I would gladly trade in half of vrays render speed for half of mantras capabilities, but we're quite far from that.
Don't get me wrong, I don't expect any responses promising that it will all change soon, I just wanted to give a bit of feedback and maybe that helps sidefx to plan future improvments. Please let me know if there is anything I should try to do in matra or clarify something I said above.