Christophe Leyder

Greetings,

We are experimenting with the -H command to render our future print jobs. We've been successful with just about all of it, there's just one problem: more than half of the machines we assign are not letting go of buckets. Its sometimes the first bucket, sometimes later; it happens rather randomly. Is there a way to debug why they would be doing this?

Thanks
Christophe

NNois

Christophe Leyder
I'm in love with this software now! Softimage seems strangely archaic now…

+1

About the noise, i personaly found that the noise pattern produced by Mantra isn't really pretty compared to the Arnold one and is a good starting point for fireflies… Setting more than the default min 1 max 9 helps a lot (like min 3 max 9) but still..

Oh yeah definitely I agree. I do think we got away with a lot due to the fact it was outdoors mostly. So even when things were in shadows they were still getting samples from the skydome or fill lights (The white environments made it easy to make light bounce around too).

In another job we just finished now we had it on around min -4 max -8. We're still kinda getting the feel for Mantra, using one renderer for so long and then moving to another is always tedious. I knew exactly what would happen when I changed a value in Arnold, but that was after years of using it, it was my home. So I'm trying to get to the same point with Mantra, a plus for that though is they're both path tracers, so its not like the jump I had to endure previously. So we're going to keep experimenting with things, we've come a long way already since we finished this ad we're showing here. I look foward to whats in store!

Enivob
It looks great. I stopped it several times to examine those snow renderings.
What was your final render size? 1920x1080?
How long did each frame take to render, and I guess I am interested in what Mantra settings you used to achieve such a clean look. There is very little noise.

It was actually surprisingly easy to get the noise away compared to renderers we've previously used. The only real issue we had was fireflies in certain specular passes. There was a few tricks we did to get rid of them, but in some cases we had to turn reflections off entirely to just get rid of them. (If anyone has tips on how to minimize fireflies please swing them!). We separated our passes with Mantra nodes, and only used takes when it was really needed (Just to keep things simpler). It wasn't really necessary to use takes much, but there were cases where we didn't have a choice. Strangely though in terms of render times, it sometimes took longer to write out IFD's for the farm than to render the actual images, although I do think it was a fault in our pipeline that caused this rather than Houdini itself, which we seemed to have resolved.

Mantra is an amazing renderer, I've come to really enjoy how flexible and stable it actually is. We've learned a lot from this project and we are already doing quite a few things differently pipeline wise (That I REALLY wish we did for this job), but hey we all have to start somewhere There are obviously going to be things I miss from what we used previously (Like per material bounce contributions and float values for light contributions), but these are just minor little things that I'm sure Mantra will eventually get itself. It's insane how much Houdini can actually help a smaller studio like ours when you start to get to know it. I was honestly really intimidated by it at first, but I'm in love with this software now! Softimage seems strangely archaic now…

Thank you SideFX
-Christophe