hagician Posted January 21, 2022 Share Posted January 21, 2022 Hey there, after years I finally decide to study Houdini more seriously. I'm starting again with the Particles course from Applied Houdini, I just finish my first run with the 2nd vol. and I'm really interested in GPU rendering because of rendering time. It's not that I don't like Mantra (actually sounds super interesting to have a native renderer so robust), but for example the last scene I worked, with like 50M particles, took me more than 10 hours to render like 4 seconds at 1280x720. So I would like to take some advices from you: since I'm just a beginner, is it interesting to already try to work with a GPU renderer, like Redshift, so my rendering time will be faster and I'll be able to explore and study more things quickly as well? Or should be better to keep with Mantra and get more knowledge about it? Thank you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TobyGaines Posted February 28, 2022 Share Posted February 28, 2022 10hrs to render 96 frames is only @6min. per frame - animations always take a long time - I'm pretty sure fx animators mostly rely on openGL rendering. It's up to you really, if you want to learn both particle fx, and rendering, there's nothing wrong with that, it just might be a little slower to learn Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madebygeoff Posted March 2, 2022 Share Posted March 2, 2022 (edited) Not everyone will agree, but to me renderers are renderers. They're not THAT different, at least when you're starting out. For learning, go for the fastest one you can afford. Redshift and Octane are both solid choices with lots of users (for support). If you're mainly focused on self-education (as opposed to production jobs) and you don't want to spend the money, Karma is also included and is a fast GPU renderer. It's still a little buggy and not fully featured for production, but you can do tons of great stuff with it for free. Once you understand the basic principles of one renderer it's not that hard to transfer that knowledge to another renderer. And over time you start to learn the strengths and weaknesses of each. There ARE differences between renderers, but the are usually fairly specific and exist in small details. At a certain level of work, those details become really important, but for a lot of work, faster is always better. Edited March 2, 2022 by madebygeoff Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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