Working Faster? How Do You Guys Do It?

[Skybar]

if you need very fast renders in small shops with no farm redshift might be an interesting option.

Or Octane that was just released for Houdini!

[amm]

I know what you mean by people (clients, account managers, editors, directors, etc..) taking for granted that rendering is insignificant and just happens. "But we only want a text change. I know, but that requires re-rendering."

 

Mantra does have several modes, Micro Polygon, Raytrace and PBR but they all seems to take the same amount of time. They all look the same too. If I setup a scene and then switch between the modes I might get a different noise pattern but it takes just as long.

 

Is there a way/setting that will convert the Micropolygon to a faster render mode?

Traditionally, REYES rendering is a synonym for techniques, similar to old school scanline renderers, like Blender internal, Max default scanline, so on. Light rigs with shadow maps, blurred reflection depicted by specular highlights. Ambient occlusion as only sort of raytracing (if there is any), in most cases set to as much short distance. Environment reflection, blocked by reflective occlusion, too. Not that much, but predictable. Some techniques become later, like point based occlusion and color bleeding, but this one was far away of predictability. More or less, what you can get in Mantra, when ray variance anti aliasing is just turned off.

 

Now I have to admit, after some small tests, that speed of shadow map generation in Mantra, and shading over many shadow maps - well it's not even close to 3delight's speed.

 

Long story short, I'm afraid the only 'total' option to get Houdini rendering significantly faster, could be upgrade to H version able to carry Octane, or upgrade of machine.

 

Just personally, I've found Mantra PBR speed as impressive - of course in appropriate category of CPU path tracers (Arnold, Blender Cycles in CPU mode, new C4d renderer).

 

Regarding partial, quick changes, I had a habit from my times with Softimage Mental Ray (hard times ), to split into render passes, whatever is possible to split. No big deal to create a bunch of ROPs in H, assigned to render different objects.

 

By the way, If I may ask, are You same Atom from Blender artist site ?

Edited June 17, 2015 by amm

[Atom]

@amm: I agree that Mantra is on par with other CPU based rendering systems. Yes, I am Atom from the Blenderartists site. After trying Houdini I do not see a point in using Blender anymore. Cycles is currently ahead of the game as far as GPU acceleration but with the loss of Brecht to SolidAngle and the abandonment of Cycles as a standalone render there is no point in pursuing it.

 

Thanks again for all the input everybody.

[fathom]

the thing that really slows down houdini is unnecessary recomputes in your sop networks.  middle click your nodes and see if things are recooking every frame ("time dependent").  if they are, do they need to be?  if they need to be, can they be put down towards the end of your sop network?  if they can't then perhaps some strategically placed cacheSops will get you where you need to be.  if there's too much data, write it to disk and re-read it.

 

also, use the profiler to see where you might be slowing down in your sop nets.