MickeyH

Thanks a lot for the advice on speeding up the render times, enivbob!

I tried some of your tips, unfortunately they didn't change the render times much. Will try the rop node soon, though, and still have to try with a more complex scene.

@verysame: Yes, houdini indie provides alembic import and export. Haven't tried it, though. Lots to learn still, yes….

update:
Just ran a crowd sim, 10 Frames at Resolution 640X320. To my surprise the render time was pretty much the same as the silly scene with the cube. Rendering at 1280X720 only took half a minute longer, raising the amount of agents from 50 to 300 added only 30 seconds to that render time. very interesting…

Thanks for taking the time to answer, Marty, really appreciate it.

If I am getting you right, you are saying that mantra will perform comparatively better in more complex scenes (=more demanding of calculations), because Houdini does not help mantra in simple scenes.
Is there a technique/setting to somehow make Houdini kick in to speed up the render?
Not that I would want to render cubes all the time;-), but sometimes you just have simple Geo.

I guess I will try some dynamics to compare again.

What difference exactly did you mean by 10% - difference houdini to cinema 4d or your to my render time in houdini ?

Again, thanks for helping out.

Hi there,

I am doing a couple of little tests in Houdini apprentice to see whether Houdini should be my future 3d application.

For testing the render speed, I am trying to render a very basic scene: Just a default cube and a sphere moving around a bit, with a default point light and a camera.

Resolution is set to 640X360

Rendering 10 frames of this scenes as a tif-sequence takes up to 4 minutes right now (pixel samples 1/1, min-max ray samples 1-4).

Not comparing apples to apples here, but cinema 4d takes less than 4 seconds to get something similar rendered. Seeing other peoples obviously using houdini on (probably) similar machines makes me think that I am missing sth. here.

Also, MPlay takes at least up to two minutes to start. The render times don't vary much, whether I render to disk or not.

Here are my specs, and just to be sure, I posted the file below:

Mac Book Pro 2012 Retina Display
i7 quad core, 2,3 ghz
256 GB SSD
Nvidia GeForce GT 650M
OS X 10.10.3

If someone could give me a hint or at least tell me whether this performance is normal, I'd be very thankful.

Cheers, M