Mantra vs Redshift

[art3mis]

Still a Houdini novice, but curious what all the fuss is with 3rd party renderers. Especially hearing a lot about Redshift.

Can any experienced Houdniks summarize the key advantages of Redshift over Mantra?

RS apparently used to create this impressive still

http://jm-b.cgsociety.org/art/sculpture-maya-woman-houdini-nude-redshift-flower-figure-pose-dry-ballisticpublishing-cfe-expose12-figures-adult-3d-1345912

[Mandrake0]

there is no VS today you can learn both with no problems. every render has pro's and con's to have the knowledge is more important! so just LEARN BOTH. 

 

as a mantra example it's not that impressiv as the still but hey it's just mantra :

 

[dpap]

On 16/07/2016 at 5:19 PM, art3mis said:

what all the fuss is with 3rd party renderers. Especially hearing a lot about Redshift.

Can any experienced Houdniks summarize the key advantages of Redshift over Mantra?

Anyone???

Edited February 25, 2017 by dpap

[SreckoM]

Main advantage is speed. Redshit is GPU render. 

[hatrick]

redshift: 

Fast, because of GPU speed. somehow limited to vram of your GPU. I think when you work with scenes that frequently go out of core, the speedadvantage over CPU rendering shrinks significantly? I heard about different experiences here. Maybe someone can bring up more details. no pointrendering at the moment.(advantage of octane). smart biased renderer, advantage over other GPU solutions. best Houdini integration (GPU)

mantra: 

due to the fact that mantra is a sidefx product it will always have advantages in terms of integration when you work with H. handles polysoups and packedprims a.s.o. (redshift is working on this), advanced shaderbuilding with VEX and VOPs, you can not compare the level of flexibility you get here. gridmarkets, amazon and some other online services to expand your render capacity, i don't know any solutions for redshift and H so far. mantra handles volumes and particles better. unlimited rendertokens with one FX license!! learning mantra might give you a deeper understanding about rendering, like working with houdini gives you deeper insights in 3D in general.

I am shure sidefx will push rendering with mantra or (something else?) in the near future. If you look at arnold GPU i.e. things seem to change a bit.

I d say it depends on what you wanna do. When you do personal and smaller scale projects the speed advantage of some GPU's is really great. We see more and more studios adapting such a workflow.

cheers

 

 

 

Edited February 25, 2017 by hatrick

[jeanmarc]

On 16/07/2016 at 7:59 PM, Mandrake0 said:

as a mantra example it's not that impressiv as the still but hey it's just mantra :

;-) not that impressive!!! héhé thanks for posting it,

Very amazing and interresting!

 

Jean-Marc

Edited March 7, 2017 by jeanmarc

[6ril]

On 2/25/2017 at 2:05 PM, hatrick said:

redshift: 

Fast, because of GPU speed. somehow limited to vram of your GPU.

Are you sure, I believe one of the key feature of redshift is the ability to use regular RAM when you reached your VRAM limit.

@dpap

@art3mis

as said in this post already, there's no comparison to be made between mantra and redshift. They are 2 different approach to rendering. Redshift is BIASED ! = no physically correct, YOU tweak it to make it look correct/good.

But, one thing for sure : there's huge difference in speed !! for example, I render 1 frame of a scene in mantra in 1 hour, and the same in redshift in less then 2 minutes !

[Daryl Dunlap]

Redshift is lightening fast.  Huge studios are migrating to it.

It's a unique GPU renderer, in that, it can go OOC (Out of Core) - this means, you are not limited to rendering scenes that can only fit in your GPU Ram.  Redshift can render scenes using GPU RAM and CPU RAM.

You can download a fully functional watermarked demo to try out with Houdini 16.  Yes, Redshift works with H16.

Redshift is Biased, meaning, it doesnt attempt to resolve the Light Equation with scientific accuracy (meaning, its not dirt slow).  But, Redshift is physically based, meaning, you can emulate Real World Materials without waiting hours/days for your render to complete.  In fact, the new Uber Shader - RS Material has: 3 reflection models, dispersion, PBR support, single and multi scatter subsurface, and coating [varnish/clear coat], just to name a few.

 

[Jason]

I would say some huge studios are spinning up some departments upon some scope of work on Redshift.  Most huge studios have thousands of headless blades in their render farm and far fewer with matching GPU resources. Software rendering will be around for years to come. Switching renderers is not trivial for for large, established pipelines for very many reasons.

That said, Redshift does a great job. It's not nearly as flexible, broad and pipelineable (from Houdini) as Mantra, but produces good images, fast. 

[jonmoore]

Well put Jason.

I'm also an advocate of Redshift and it's plus points go beyond the mere speed of GPU over CPU. The Redshift developers picked up on some of the finer aspects of the rendering workflow in XSI (Redshift was XSI only in the beginning) and those workflows have been brought over into other hosts. One such example is XSI strand rendering. This makes Redshift great for e.g. creating geometry at render time from curves generated via reaction diffusion/growth type experiments. Far faster than Polywire/Mantra.

Redshift is also far more flexible than Octane when it comes to making use of attributes to drive your shaders.

I think if you're student of an independent artist, Redshift should be at the top of your shopping list, but having knowledge of Mantra, RenderMan and Arnold will be more useful when looking for a gig.

Looking at the latest benchmarks that Chaos Group put out last Friday (that included a new nVidia tech for combing GPU VRAM across multiple units) you can see why a selection of the more forward thinking studios are dipping their toes into GPU rendering. I think we're a few years away from GPU's taking over but with Moore's Law being Dodo like in CPU land, the fact that's alive and well on the GPU may mean that it comes quicker that some have been predicting.

https://labs.chaosgroup.com/index.php/rendering-rd/v-ray-gpu-benchmarks-on-top-of-the-line-nvidia-gpus/

Edited March 9, 2017 by jonmoore