Do houdini users render realistic objects?

[michael]

download one of these scenes and just start practicing

http://www.3drender.com/challenges/

if you have specific questions just post in a Work in Progress thread

[Guest tar]

4 hours ago, Atom said:

I was unaware that there was a Mantra secret cropping feature turned on by default.

It's not a crop but the Exr data window. Used correctly it improves compositing operations enormously, Nuke uses it, Fusion and Houdini Compositor correctly interprets it.

http://www.openexr.com/TechnicalIntroduction.pdf

 

You could move on from After Effects and use Fusion, it's free, or Nuke Non-commercial. This will also help you if you are wanting to work in the Vfx industry.

https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/nz/products/fusion#

https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/products/nuke/non-commercial/

 

[Atom]

The problem with Fusion and Natron is that they don't support audio. Whaaaaaaat? I can't get a MP4 to work in them either. I consider them both Beta options, however, and try out each new release. I did not realize Nuke had a non-commerical version, I may have to try that but with no support for MP4 or H264 that kinds of limits my options. At least as an After Effects replacement.

After Effects is just so good at reading camera footage I can't see dropping that.

[NNois]

20 hours ago, Skybar said:

Replicate the issue in a simple scene and post it?

That's not a Mantra secret feature of cropping !!! you are just using exr and photoshop and after effect don't read them correctly and that's adobe fault ;-)
// seem the last adobe after 2016 is correct now

[Skybar]

Has Adobe ever been good at handling exrs? Probably a safer bet to render out tiffs if it's headed to anything Adobe.

[Guest tar]

11 hours ago, Atom said:

The problem with Fusion and Natron is that they don't support audio. Whaaaaaaat? I can't get a MP4 to work in them either. I consider them both Beta options, however, and try out each new release. I did not realize Nuke had a non-commerical version, I may have to try that but with no support for MP4 or H264 that kinds of limits my options. At least as an After Effects replacement.

After Effects is just so good at reading camera footage I can't see dropping that.

Try out Nuke Studio for timeline and audio. I used AfterEffects at the turn of the millennium for ~4 years and it's very good, but since then have never needed audio, and, inter-frame codecs are an antitheses to fast compositing operations and workflow. Good for editing only.

[edward]

On 4/21/2016 at 9:27 AM, Skybar said:

Has Adobe ever been good at handling exrs? Probably a safer bet to render out tiffs if it's headed to anything Adobe.

I'm not sure if After Effects supports floating point TIFF images?

[SreckoM]

I am doing a lot realistic images with Houdini. For product viz I am using it almost exclusively, sometimes I drop Blender into soup. 

It is slower than Cycle GPU but not CPU. Also I am getting similar speed as with Arnold and same quality. So I do not see Mantra not being able to produce realistic images, and I am not finding it being slow.

And also I do recommend GridMarkets too!

Some of older work I did with Houdini and Mantra, also modeled in Houdini:

[Atom]

I guess that is the difference between rendering a still vs an animation. For stills, who can't wait all night for a single frame on any render system?

But as an animator I need 2,000 frames or more in a reasonable amount of time. And even at Mantra's lowest noisiest setting I am still faced with hundreds of hours of render time just to see a preview of a modest weight scene. Sometimes flipbook quality is not enough and the OpenGL ROP seems to be ignored and has very limited capabilities.

I actually wish I had the Blender Internal renderer inside of Houdini. When I first started using Houdini I thought that the micropolygon renderer would be faster than Raytrace or Physical but they all seem to be equally slow.

I would like to get at least 2-3 revisions done a day. So 2000 times 3 equals 6000 frames divided by 8 hours equals a frame every 4.8 seconds. That is a hard pressed deadline. If I accept only a single revision per-day I can up that to 14.6 seconds per-frame. If I accept half-resolution renders we'll say I can double my time to 30 seconds per-frame. And that is just dedicating 8 hours a day to rendering let alone actual time for creating and editing things. Ugh when I start to do the math I just get depressed...

Edited April 23, 2016 by Atom

[amm]

8 hours ago, edward said:

I'm not sure if After Effects supports floating point TIFF images?

I'd say it depends what is considered as support. While it can load floating point exr and tiff and display effects typical for range over 1, alpha is always processed as something that looks like a double multiply, or some clamp. Some built in effects are still limited to 8 or 16 bit, so entire comp became clamped in such case, with small warning icon over particular effect. Similar with Photoshop, only some effects are working, maximum allowed range is 20. It's not mistake to round all that to zero, I think, especially in times of free Fusion.

[SreckoM]

2 hours ago, Atom said:

I guess that is the difference between rendering a still vs an animation. For stills, who can't wait all night for a single frame on any render system?

But as an animator I need 2,000 frames or more in a reasonable amount of time. And even at Mantra's lowest noisiest setting I am still faced with hundreds of hours of render time just to see a preview of a modest weight scene. Sometimes flipbook quality is not enough and the OpenGL ROP seems to be ignored and has very limited capabilities.

I actually wish I had the Blender Internal renderer inside of Houdini. When I first started using Houdini I thought that the micropolygon renderer would be faster than Raytrace or Physical but they all seem to be equally slow.

I would like to get at least 2-3 revisions done a day. So 2000 times 3 equals 6000 frames divided by 8 hours equals a frame every 4.8 seconds. That is a hard pressed deadline. If I accept only a single revision per-day I can up that to 14.6 seconds per-frame. If I accept half-resolution renders we'll say I can double my time to 30 seconds per-frame. Ugh when I start to do the math I just get depressed... 

Well that is trade between realism and fast renders. Also depends what you do, for motion grapichs you probably do not need GI you can do most just with AO. But for product vis and archviz that level of quality can not be sold any more, clients are more demanding  GPU there helps getting faster renders but they do not offer so much features as Mantra do, and still need to take care about RAM. So it is always some kind of trade. I prefer renders like Arnold and Mantra, find acceptable level of noise and that is only thing you need to take care of.

I do animations too, usually clients consult previz for animation flow and static images for render quality. Or just low res noisier images. And GridMarkets is for finals, I really do not plan to purchase any more machines if I can use GridMarkets or Amazon directly, it is cheaper.

And having 2-3 revisions of 2000 frames, HD format, that is really crazy task  

Edited April 23, 2016 by SreckoM

[Guest tar]

4 hours ago, Atom said:

 

I would like to get at least 2-3 revisions done a day. So 2000 times 3 equals 6000 frames divided by 8 hours equals a frame every 4.8 seconds. 

Octane already does this. Export an .abc out from H to Octane Render.   It can render AO style animations in a few seconds, though once you start rendering simmed geometry, there is PCIe transfer times, that part is slower than Mantra.

 

Maya's viewport 2.0 is meant to be good enough for motion graphics, and it's realtime- not too sure how much better than Houdini it is though tbh.

[Hamp]

On 2016-04-20 at 6:38 PM, Atom said:

Also no one else seems to experience this error but it does kind of stop me I'm my tracks. I keep installing the new Houdini version when one comes out hoping it will just be fixed. But a recent render not even using pyro at all also produced wrong image size files.

I do like contributing and reporting bugs but it does take time to gather assets and present them as a case for a bug. Sometimes I just don't have the time to do that. Especially when I am pressed to get work done.

As others have stated, it's just the exr data window, which is not a bad thing - it's just that AE interprets it wrongly. 

Use ProEXR and replace the one built-in in AE, and the problem goes away.

http://www.fnordware.com/OpenEXR/

[edward]

Even easier if you just tell Mantra to not generate them in the first place if your compositor doesn't handle them.

[Hamp]

Yes, of course it is. Unless you have a mixed Nuke/AE environment and read the same EXR with datawindow for different purposes.

Every pipeline is different, right?