Clarisse iFX ?

[CinnamonMetal]

I know Fusion is powerful, although anyone use Clarisse iFX and your thoughts ?

[davpe]

from what point of view do you want to see it? clarisse and fusion are two very different products and I don't think any general comparison is relevant.

Edited October 9, 2017 by davpe

[Atom]

The only reason to use Clarisse was the speed of version 2.0. With the new release of Clarisse 3.0, and more light accurate rendering, the product has lost some speed. With Redshift on the scene there is really no reason to use Clarisse unless you are facing some incredibly high instance count, which is Clarisse's claim to fame. It is CPU based, not GPU based.

I tried out Clarisse quite a bit before I chose Redshift. By using a render system that is native to Houdini you save more time and don't have to learn another package's quirks and or limitations.

Clarisse's API has no external event hooks, this means you can't write a script or expression to change something when the frame changes. All code inside Clarisse must run as a one-shot generator.

Edited October 9, 2017 by Atom

[CinnamonMetal]

Thanks for the info; with that, I'll stay with Fusion 

[shawn_kearney]

I really liked using Clarisse, and I respectfully disagree with Atom's opinion.  Clarisse can do a lot of really cool stuff in terms of pre-compositing and scene layout. It's a very fast and intuitive system when managing huge scenes with lots of assets and tons of passes. Working on a project that uses a large variety of assets I often feel like it'd be really nice if we had clarisse to manage it all. I've easily written enough python for c4d/arnold to pay for at least one or two clarisse licenses.

That said, if you don't work with large, complex layouts then there probably isn't a lot of use for it, and Houdini is certainly capable of managing the scale that Clarisse does. Only that Clarisse is kind of purpose-built for this sort of task.

Edited October 30, 2017 by shawn_kearney