Hello, I was just messing around with Houdini FX and made a small animation of a cube sliding. When I tried to render it with a mantra node (1x1 pixel sample size and 1 max ray samples), I was surprised how slow it was! It's just a simple cube with a camera.

When it actually renders a frame it goes by fairly quickly. But it waits between each frame for a very long (more than 20 seconds) and seems like it isn't doing anything.

So I thought maybe my computer was too slow (laptop) so I moved to my desktop which has a 1GB Nvidia card and quadcore i7 and it still ran just as slow! Any ideas what the issue might be? I attached my file below.

Super fast on my computer.

But dude don't push your cpu with big scenes like this !

(sorry I can't help you)

that animation runs at light speed on my computer, not a new one either (amd64x2 6400 8Gb nvidia 9600GT) but then it is only a box moving between two points.

list you exact desktop pc spec if you want someone to point out the weak link would be my suggestion ;0)

silla
Hello, I was just messing around with Houdini FX and made a small animation of a cube sliding. When I tried to render it with a mantra node (1x1 pixel sample size and 1 max ray samples), I was surprised how slow it was! It's just a simple cube with a camera.

When it actually renders a frame it goes by fairly quickly. But it waits between each frame for a very long (more than 20 seconds) and seems like it isn't doing anything.

So I thought maybe my computer was too slow (laptop) so I moved to my desktop which has a 1GB Nvidia card and quadcore i7 and it still ran just as slow! Any ideas what the issue might be? I attached my file below.

It may be a system kind of hiccup – Houdini starting the mantra process, or mantra trying to connect to the image viewer.

Try rendering a sequence to disk files and see if that's faster.

Mantra tries to connect to the image viewer (mplay) using a socket, so AV might get in the way (depending on your system).

Knowing the OS might help.