MADjestic Posted November 15, 2005 Share Posted November 15, 2005 hi, I hope I am not becoming a Maya fan or anything - but a couple of minutes ago I saw a guy generating 10 000 000 particles (and he said that each particle is surrounded by other particles as well) in a couple of seconds and then playing back the viewport (with forces affecting particles) at about 1 frame per second rate. If I try to generate 4+ millions of particles in Houdini (under WindowsXP, haven't tryied it for Linux) - it either crashes or halts or the interactivity of the viewport reaches 0. I do understand that the number of particles is not everything and there are other more important things and all... but man - How can possibly Maya beat the All-Mighty-Houdini when almost everyone on the WEB has heard that "Houdini has better particles"?! Please, Holy Fathers, - guide me through these foul times... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slade Posted November 15, 2005 Share Posted November 15, 2005 i guess in this context size doesn't matter I guess its all about control and the many ways you can manipulate the particles in houdini Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michael Posted November 15, 2005 Share Posted November 15, 2005 I might be wrong about this but I seem to remember something about the way Maya /displays/ particles being 'optimized' in some way - ie not actually seeing all the particles in the viewport... again I might be wrong about this... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted November 15, 2005 Share Posted November 15, 2005 So how many real particles are there if you only count the "centres" ? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MADjestic Posted November 15, 2005 Author Share Posted November 15, 2005 edward, actually I don't know much about the way Maya generates particles. I wish I could know the trick that allows Maya looke like it can work with 10mln particles. Is it some sort of fake? So that if there was some script that could get particle's IDs - it would show that there are actually less, than 10mln? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ivan Posted November 15, 2005 Share Posted November 15, 2005 mantra will render 10 million motion-blurred opaque particles in 2 gigs of ram at ntsc in under 2 minutes. The only problem is getting the data to the renderer. hi,I hope I am not becoming a Maya fan or anything - but a couple of minutes ago I saw a guy generating 10 000 000 particles (and he said that each particle is surrounded by other particles as well) in a couple of seconds and then playing back the viewport (with forces affecting particles) at about 1 frame per second rate. If I try to generate 4+ millions of particles in Houdini (under WindowsXP, haven't tryied it for Linux) - it either crashes or halts or the interactivity of the viewport reaches 0. I do understand that the number of particles is not everything and there are other more important things and all... but man - How can possibly Maya beat the All-Mighty-Houdini when almost everyone on the WEB has heard that "Houdini has better particles"?! Please, Holy Fathers, - guide me through these foul times... 22607[/snapback] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted November 15, 2005 Share Posted November 15, 2005 Please, Holy Fathers, - guide me through these foul times... 22607[/snapback] Please don't make the mistake thinking that a sheer number of particles defines whether it has a good particle system. It's the tools to manipulate and direct particles that make the biggest difference. The more polygons a model has doesn't make it a better model. Art is art and you need sculpting tools to define and direct it. Maya has some good tools but I haven't seen it do a thing Houdini cannot do and I've seen it work a thousand times the other way 'round. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
keltuzar Posted November 16, 2005 Share Posted November 16, 2005 no matter what software one uses, be in maya, siftimage, houdini, it needs to goto the rendering engine. I would be more concerned if Maya renderer couldnt render so many particles quckly as opposed to Renderman or Mantra engines that spit out frames like its cake walk. but I also agree, if houdini cannot display as much as maya if not more, even though with so much control it does help to show a live demonstration of many particles wizzing around.... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
peship Posted November 16, 2005 Share Posted November 16, 2005 mmm, maya got a huge performance boost in the last several versions. version 5 is a bitch slow software, version 7 is the fastest thing around. when it comes to particle motion itself, maya offers more ( ok, ok, at least i think so, based on my experience ), because of the ability to build massive scripting sessions easilly - i'm simply reprogramming the particles - mr.particle, please go there, jump three times, make a loop and come back here, and do it exactly how i want it. the other side - particle instancer in maya is literally nuked-up, having access to only 20 or so predefined attributes of the instanced geometry ... ouch ! that's the biggest difference between particles in maya and houdini. most of the interface between particles and the rest of the scene relies on scripting - often it is way too mutch. grabbing a normal from the closest point of geometry shape and assigning it as velocity to a particle requires 5-6 lines of code and pretty good knowledge of maya. in houdini we can do this with few clicks, without worrying about vector math and stuff - good, very good. and it just works. that's only one example, but it generalises the differences. mayaParticles > POPs mayaParticles < POPs*SOPs from my experience PRMan is not that good rendering multiple semitransparent layers ( sprites, instances or whatever ), both MR and Mantra offer better performance here. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MADjestic Posted November 16, 2005 Author Share Posted November 16, 2005 Oh, Fathers I must confess in pusillanimity, I was blind but you guided me on this menacing path. Brother Kodiak instructed me how to obtain the sacred knowledge about Maya particles and there number. Thanks to his dircetions I investigated the scene that seemd to contain 10mln+ particles. I erred. And I beg your forgiveness. -------------------------------------------------------------------- The scene contained pathetic ~69 700 real particles and x10 MultiPoint. The verdict: HOUDINI FO LIFE! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Jason Posted November 17, 2005 Share Posted November 17, 2005 Crap, you had me birthing 10m particles and seeing a "pathetic" 6 secs/frame. This might work a bit better. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MADjestic Posted November 17, 2005 Author Share Posted November 17, 2005 Jason, was it Maya or Houdini? Was it normal particles or some more sophisticated technique? How powerful was that computer you used (CPU, Memory, Video)? Thanks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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