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Which FX Houses have Houdini FX TDs?


magneto

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ILM uses their in house ZENO primarily, and Houdini as secondary tool like Maya.

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/ilms-scientific-solutions/

 

MPC uses KALI primarily based within Maya

http://www.moving-picture.com/film/technology_4ff7184519bf

 

Microsoft - 343, Black Tusk, Central,

Blizzard - Cinematics

 

http://vfxworldmap.com/

http://www.gamedevmap.com/

 

Usually Houdini has few seeds everywhere. The cost of the seed is detrimental to full studio implementation, but most big studios have a seed or two with people in house that have used it. Rule of thumb if it has over a hundred plus there will be a seed, if there is more than 200 there will be a few seeds. Any "FX" studio has it. Most commercial studios have an artist that can use it. Even studios that say they are xsi, max or maya only have Houdini in house or rent a license if they are a commercial operation. 

 

What happen to the odforce wiki page on companies? What happened to the wiki?

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Pablo i would be curious to get your pov on how Mantra stand in front of prman 19 RIS @dneg for lighting task. :)

My latest news is that prman is not going to be used anymore.

This doesn't mean it won't be used at all, but is expensive to adapt old prman pipelines to the latest prman, and honestly we have suffered sooo much with the previous versions.

We are now mostly Clarisse ( for good and bad ) and Mantra.

I haven't used prman19. But looking at Mantra and all the new renders, I think Mantra is still the most flexible and solid renderer, in pair with Houdini is the best tool for rendering fx, but it is truth it needs to catch with lots of new techniques, it needs to handle more geometry using less memory, be much more faster doing tesellations for displacement and improve the quality of the sampling.

But overall is probably the best renderer for me , at least the only one that can handles ANY kind of task in vfx, it is probably not the best in anything ( except volumes) but it can handle anything you throw to it.

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Hmm... interesting. So they don't use some custom procedural system for special effects?

 

Many studios have their own software but it does not mean that they are limited to it.

They also used 3dsmax for fx in few occasions :)

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Guest mantragora

Many studios have their own software but it does not mean that they are limited to it.

They also used 3dsmax for fx in few occasions :)

 

No, I'm just surprised because some person who spend 5 last years on Houdini told me that he's gone to ILM work on Maya... and I was even more surprised when I saw that he done procedural effects and R&D there. Last time I checked (and all the people I know of who done it) you had to write quite a lot of code to get anything 'procedural' out of Maya, and on top of it, Houdini (and before it a 3dsmax) guy making R&D on Maya without extensive Maya API knowledge? Yeah, right. I suppose he was doing R&D where are the command in the menu. 

 

That's why I thought that the only possibility for this would be if they had they own procedural extension that uses Maya as environment. That is the only way someone could manage to pull out something like this (procedural stuff + R&D).

 

Otherwise, I call it bullshit.

 

I myself, with Houdini + HDK + couple other APIs of couple other programs I use, have exactly zero time to mess with shit that Autodesk produces. And with the subscription prices I don't think that my feet will will cross Autodesk land anytime soon, if ever.

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My latest news is that prman is not going to be used anymore.

This doesn't mean it won't be used at all, but is expensive to adapt old prman pipelines to the latest prman, and honestly we have suffered sooo much with the previous versions.

We are now mostly Clarisse ( for good and bad ) and Mantra.

I haven't used prman19. But looking at Mantra and all the new renders, I think Mantra is still the most flexible and solid renderer, in pair with Houdini is the best tool for rendering fx, but it is truth it needs to catch with lots of new techniques, it needs to handle more geometry using less memory, be much more faster doing tesellations for displacement and improve the quality of the sampling.

But overall is probably the best renderer for me , at least the only one that can handles ANY kind of task in vfx, it is probably not the best in anything ( except volumes) but it can handle anything you throw to it.

 

Thanks for all the info Pablo !

 

That's the big problem with RIS, basically they Ctrl+A -> Del the Reyes Workflow , and either you go REYES either you go RIS but line beetween the 2 are not blur.

And thus if you choose RIS you choose to adopt a brute force path. And in this regards engine like arnold / maxwell have their word to say. I agree that mantra now

replace brillantly the flexibility / quality ratio prman has in the past. But the main problem of mantra is that SESI is not pushing it as an agnostic engine and his dependance to

houdini would be his main cons compare to Arnold / Maxwell / V-ray ... imo.

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Thanks for all the info Pablo !

 

That's the big problem with RIS, basically they Ctrl+A -> Del the Reyes Workflow , and either you go REYES either you go RIS but line beetween the 2 are not blur.

And thus if you choose RIS you choose to adopt a brute force path. And in this regards engine like arnold / maxwell have their word to say. I agree that mantra now

replace brillantly the flexibility / quality ratio prman has in the past. But the main problem of mantra is that SESI is not pushing it as an agnostic engine and his dependance to

houdini would be his main cons compare to Arnold / Maxwell / V-ray ... imo.

For me the main problem is not that they have ditched REYES is the fact that they have ditched RSL!

So all the code studios have been writing for years is pretty much useless now.

In Mantra you have REYES and PBR and both uses VEX. Huge difference.

And well about the dependency on Houdini well, this could be a long discussion but as usual you have to balance the cost of integrating your agnostic renderer into your preferred platform against getting pretty much the whole pipeline done out of the box.

Having suffering different types of integration of prman in the past in several companies, honestly working with something as integrated as Mantra/Houdini is a relief.

For me performance is not the most important thing, you lost more time in all the stupid bugs that you find in many ports of renderers into 3d platforms, or limitations in that integrations.

This is usually the real bottleneck in production.

And probably aside from this discussion, I am not a big fan of all of this new wave of fragmented pipelines, but this could probably be a discussion fora different thread.

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yeah. In theory you should be able to login using your forums username and password... but since we have so many people spamming it, I'm not sure that's working as well as I'd hoped :). Either way, please go ahead and update it to your hearts content.

 

M

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