In the consumer segment Houdini Indie is competing with Maya Indie and Blender. Maya has Arnold (CPU/GPU) for free and Blender Cycles (CPU/GPU) is of course free. Cycles is very capable and user friendly and Arnold is one of the best renderers ever made. Houdini would definitely be on the back foot if they went commercial with Karma. It would make sense to have a paid version for advanced USD rendering in big studios, but as the default Houdini renderer (which I guess is what they're shooting for eventually?), not so much. Anyway, this is all speculation since this is the first I heard of it being potentially not free!

BrianHanke
In the consumer segment Houdini Indie is competing with Maya Indie and Blender. Maya has Arnold (CPU/GPU) for free and Blender Cycles (CPU/GPU) is of course free. Cycles is very capable and user friendly and Arnold is one of the best renderers ever made. Houdini would definitely be on the back foot if they went commercial with Karma. It would make sense to have a paid version for advanced USD rendering in big studios, but as the default Houdini renderer (which I guess is what they're shooting for eventually?), not so much. Anyway, this is all speculation since this is the first I heard of it being potentially not free!

I highly doubt Sidefx won't ship at least one karma license with Houdini. The question is if blocks of karma keys will eventually be sold for cash money. Similarly, Katana 'comes with' 3delight but you won't be able to render on the farm with it unless you buy 3delight keys for katana non-interactive. Maya 'comes with' Arnold, but you still need to buy enough Arnold keys to cover the hundreds or thousands of renderfarm nodes that won't each have a Maya key. Mantra is currently, and has been as far as I remember, no charge for these keys. It's part of how we justify using it, as we can make up for it's speed shortfalls by throwing machines at it. I hope karma will stay no charge, as the cost is one of the few justifications we have over using other render engines. I also want it to be good though, and maybe it will be good enough to justify the cost over other products.

jsmack
I highly doubt Sidefx won't ship at least one karma license with Houdini. The question is if blocks of karma keys will eventually be sold for cash money. Similarly, Katana 'comes with' 3delight but you won't be able to render on the farm with it unless you buy 3delight keys for katana non-interactive. Maya 'comes with' Arnold, but you still need to buy enough Arnold keys to cover the hundreds or thousands of renderfarm nodes that won't each have a Maya key. Mantra is currently, and has been as far as I remember, no charge for these keys. It's part of how we justify using it, as we can make up for it's speed shortfalls by throwing machines at it. I hope karma will stay no charge, as the cost is one of the few justifications we have over using other render engines. I also want it to be good though, and maybe it will be good enough to justify the cost over other products.

Ah, makes a lot of sense!

Yes, exactly.

And Arnold is not free, as mentioned above. Cycles? Sure, go throw a bunch of heavy stuff at it.
The future is absolutely in 3rd party land, it was only ever a Mantra centric environment due to free render
tokens making up for slow rendering. But you go do the math, a "free" engine that is 5x-20x slower than a commercial
one at $500 per year. That "free" is very very quickly evaporated.

Brian, Karma is all USD, it is only USD. That is the point. It is not a simple replacement for Mantra, which is still
capable, but is just in Maintenance mode, nothing wrong with still using it. Karma will require a lot of work, and for
a lot of users, USD, for at least a couple more years is totally pointless. So 3rd party engines will take over, and
as USD matures into easier to use/easier to see the benefit, Karma will shine really well.

Again, I don't know what is so shocking about having to "pay" for a quality engine, Devvd internally or not. You're
already getting Houdini for not $5k, but $250 so......

tinyhawkus
The future is absolutely in 3rd party land, it was only ever a Mantra centric environment due to free render
tokens making up for slow rendering. But you go do the math, a "free" engine that is 5x-20x slower than a commercial
one at $500 per year. That "free" is very very quickly evaporated.

That's not true. Mantra is probably the most customizable render engine around. And it's not slow at all for complex scenes. The only thing that it really lacks - quick interactive IPR.
Let's take our short film HOME [vimeo.com] as an example. To render one frame HQ took about 30 minutes on 64 core machine on average (we tend to render everything in frame without much compositing). With multi SSS, volumetrics and so on. And it's very efficient when using packed disk primitives.

MikasSadas
Let's take our short film HOME [vimeo.com] as an example.

Christ that is amazing. How have I never heard of this short before?!? I'd love to see some process/BTS for how you guys went about creating it.

MikasSadas
That's not true. Mantra is probably the most customizable render engine around. And it's not slow at all for complex scenes. The only thing that it really lacks - quick interactive IPR.

Beautiful animation! And that's a very good point about Mantra (and by extension a lot of the "slower" renderers): things tend to equalize when scenes get more complex. Octane is super fast for simpler scenes, but once you get a lot of stuff going on I found the same scene rendered in about the same time in Karma, Arnold, Octane... The exceptionally slow IPR in Mantra is definitely a problem, but Karma improves on that a lot.

No, things do not equalize when complexity increases. It's quite the opposite.

Mikkas I never suggested Mantra wasn't the most flexible. I've used it for 12yrs, at a deep level.
But it is slow. Painfully slow. A 64 core machine should indeed be rendering those scenes in decent times, but you bench
scenes against Mantra, and it falls down quickly these days.

The free aspect of a license is almost useless once you pile on render times. Quickly eaten up by Artist time/money.
Regarding complexity, really, you need to be talking multiple difficult scenarios. Geometric, motion blur, close to camera,
multiple scattering, the works.

I don't see how packed disk stuff plays into render time though. Packed and delayed helps IFD creation, but that's nothing
unique to Mantra. It all still needs to be unpacked into geometry to render.


Cheers

Lewis

tinyhawkus
No, things do not equalize when complexity increases. It's quite the opposite.

Absolutely: the difference will in fact increase.

Just wondering if i missed anything since the sneak peak/tech demo last year. Anything newsworthy?

rickvdvulkaan
Just wondering if i missed anything since the sneak peak/tech demo last year. Anything newsworthy?

I haven't seen any news, but I have high hopes for Karma/Solaris in the next major version of Houdini. 18.5 made a lot of improvements so I expect 19 will be even better. If Karma was a touch faster and less noisy I'd use it all the time.

BrianHanke

rickvdvulkaan
Just wondering if i missed anything since the sneak peak/tech demo last year. Anything newsworthy?

I haven't seen any news, but I have high hopes for Karma/Solaris in the next major version of Houdini. 18.5 made a lot of improvements so I expect 19 will be even better. If Karma was a touch faster and less noisy I'd use it all the time.

It's still missing features I think, unless I haven't been following its progress well enough. Deeps, line rendering, as well as some problems with animated shader parms, and probably a bunch of other stuff.

hmm ok,

patience is key i guess

Hello
my pC specs Houdini19 apprentice version
ryzen 7 2700x
gpu 1060 3gb msi
16 gb 3600 mhz clocked ram

karma cpu is working but karma xpu is not showing any result (blacked out )
please help me with this

ShubhamRai
Hello
my pC specs Houdini19 apprentice version
ryzen 7 2700x
gpu 1060 3gb msi
16 gb 3600 mhz clocked ram

karma cpu is working but karma xpu is not showing any result (blocked out )
please help me with this

Check your driver.
https://www.sidefx.com/Support/system-requirements/ [www.sidefx.com]

ShubhamRai
Hello
my pC specs Houdini19 apprentice version
ryzen 7 2700x
gpu 1060 3gb msi
16 gb 3600 mhz clocked ram

karma cpu is working but karma xpu is not showing any result (blocked out )
please help me with this

What do you mean by "blocked out".
Even if your GPU driver is out of date, or your GPU is below-spec, the CPU device should still be running.
You should still see something in the view port, but just not running at "GPU" speed (ie probably same speed as regular Karma)

The following scene should run fine in KarmaXPU.
Its just a torus by itself.
Do you see the torus?

Thanks!
Brian

业力渲染器现在是非常急需的，HOudini在渲染器上非常存在缺陷，所以业力渲染器非常重要，但是现在有很多遗憾，很多功能无法使用，而且通道都无法输出，houdini正在落后，希望学习一些blend和ue.

i am creating explosion with shockwave and trail it looks fine in viewport , but while taking playblast it automatically quits after 190 frames out of 250frame simulation . please help me with this. my PC specs
ryzen 7 2700x 8C 16T
gtx 1060 3gb
32 gb 3600mhz ram