Have you ever heard about this?

[symek]

I love so many details about this app, just feel it's almost impossible to deliver what is promised. I't like a game engine executed on a CPU, which is a neat idea, just hard to accomplish without constrains, so that it becomes just like a game engine... Lots of SESI's gui work wisely copied. Can't read in bigger objs on my machine though...

[danylyon]

I was quite excited about clarisse.. heard a few things here and there. Heard its already in production at some places, they are using it for small commercial jobs.

After watching the cmiVFX intro video I'm a bit dissapointed. It's Idea seems a bit like Katana, just more for small teams or one man jobs. And from what I've seen it's not node based either! It looks a bit like Adobe made a 3D App.. with a bit of XSI and Flame thrown in.

I don't think it's even remotely targeting Houdinis market.. they could probably work great in tandem.

[rohandalvi]

hi,

I downloaded the PLE version a few days ago. Firstly it's nothing like Houdini. No modeling, particles or dynamics capabilities. Everything has to be imported. It's primarily a scene setup, lighting , rendering and compositing tool.

It's quite simple to use. took me about 30 mins to get a hang of the software. The user manual has a few tuts. the renderer is quite simple but it gets the result. The material is not a physically accurate shader, but again it can be tweaked to get the result.

But, it's still at a very early stage. Works quite well with the .lwo file format. I exported some stuff from modo to clarisse using lwo, it came in quite nicely. Havent tried importing animation as yet.

It's something quite different, in terms of what they want to achieve essentially mixing the entire 3d lighting and rendering pipeline and adding a compositing system so you dont need to go a separate compositing tool like nuke. But as I said it's still really new so just some basic color correction tools nothing else No filters. Still havent figured out how to render out passes.

But the good news, the viewport and interactive renderer are phenomenal. The final render is a bit slow, but on the interactivity side, it's mindblowing. I took 2 trees , with just two materials, one for leaves and one for the trunk. nothing fancy. no reflections or translucency. Both trees were approx. 40mb each no idea of the poly count but pretty heavy and I scattered them using clarisse.

I started at a 100 trees, no proxies or instances, ( if it's doing it behind the scene no idea) I had the render running side by side. Basic direct light, dome light and brute force gi. I cranked up the number to 8000. The renderer didn't even blink. The viewport was at 1.7 billion polys. Then I jumped it upto 50000. and the viewport and render were still interactive. That was pretty impressive and I am working on an i7 920 with just 4 gb ram.

I think they have a really solid base which they can build upon.

regards

Rohan

P.S. SYmek, use the lwo format, that works just fine for importing, it tends to crash with heavier obj files.

Edited December 25, 2012 by rohandalvi

[Diego A Grimaldi]

Sorry to dig out this old thread, but I was wondering if anybody has used a combo of Houdini and Clarisse.

 

I've just heard that dneg is starting to implementing it a lot for Maya and Houdini and I was wondering if anybody tried it out.

 

It seems like a very powerful renderer from what I hear.

 

Thanks