There's a version .02 drop of the Redshift3d for Houdini18/Hydra plugin in the RS Dev Forum. Alot of nice fixes came in this week. Check it out: https://www.redshift3d.com/forums/viewthread/28473/

A preview version of the Redshift Solaris plugin for Houdini 18, is available on the Redshift3d Forums. Redshift Solaris plugin [www.redshift3d.com]

The whole point of a Proxy is to bypass Scene Extraction stage of Rendering - if it still had to check each single Proxy to see if there are duplicate attributes in the DCC vs Proxy, then you'd lose some of the benefit of a Proxy to begin with.

Redshift 2.6.28 added support for rendering Packed Primitives and instancing them. The next Redshift release will take this a step further, and add support for Automatically Instancing SubNets as well.

The value of RTX in raytracing is scene dependent - as the RT cores can only do one thing, shoot rays for intersection, they cant shade, and they are restricted to certain primitive types [at the moment]. Production Shading is a huge part of the rendering process, and RTX will only marginally improve via the RTX platform specs, not RT cores. Couple that with the rumor that Vendors tried to send back a literal mountain of 10xx cards to NVidia, that were manufactured for the Crypto market, that NVidia is forcing Vendors to now sell. Plus, NvLink is still a no-go for the consumer line of RTX cards. So, personally, there's just alot more value in a 1080ti right now. I expect the price to continue to fall actually. Any RTX render engine is at least several months away from Alpha stage, because they have to rewrite their engine to use the Optix API - which is what provides access to the RT cores on the RTX platform. edit: Turns out NVlink is available for 2080 and 2080ti - that's a big deal for larger scenes. So that's 22GB of VRAM for around $2.5k, that's an attractive option.

Wow - very impressive resume. How in the world can I achieve what you've already done? Doing LookDev and FX and working remotely. Are you accepting any Apprentices?

Wait a second, I was just about to say, if you want Vex course work, you can pay exclusively for that on the Entagma Patreon - but, it sounds like you are not currently subscribed to the Entagma Patreon, but are simply consuming their "free" content!? Now, MOPs is some additional "free" content from the likes of Entagma, and your argument is that, "Hey, no, dont waste time creating free things I wont use, please only create free things that I want"? I cant believe you have the selfishness to even type such a comment - let alone try and defend it.

Psst...Redshift3D! *poof*

20% off Redshift 3D License Get'em while their hot!

Oh I really like that....man...that has SO many uses in procedural modelling.

Is there even a way to disable OpenCL on compatible devices? My understanding is that OpenCL will use GPU, and if not available, will fall back to CPU. That's the reason its safe to use OpenCL SOP in HDA's.

Thanks for that sample file, it took me a few hours, but I finally understand the OpenCL SOP and the data I/O between Houdini and the GPU

What the Blender Foundation is doing with Eevee is very impressive. I know Houdini has an OpenGL ROP with at least diffuse/reflection/displacement viewport support, but nothing for full screen Post Effects (bloom, blur, etc.) Can anyone speak on whether SESI will invest in this area soon?

IPR is a progressive render session that is designed to be near interactive. The render engine you use (Mantra, Vray, Redshift, Octane) is up to your personal preference. My opinion of the build notes is that you can take advantage of integrated Vray IPR sessions in the Houdini viewport , versus doing IPR in the Vray Framebuffer.

Next release of Redshift will contain initial support for Material Stylesheets.