Hi.

I know Clarisse is not well known yet, but a Houdini Engine for Clarisse would be awesome. Please considere it.

Cheers,
Guy.

I agree, Houdini Engine for Clarisse would bring the bacon home.

Houdini Engine is good tool for creative softwares such as Maya ,Max and also Unity.

I think Clarisse is not whole creative software , we should make our stuffs in other 3D applications and export them to the Clarisse specially for rendering and Look Dev .

Maybe some day Sidefx do this , But after another 3D applications :roll:

+1 !!
Houdini Engine in Clarisse makes sense

+1

there is this:
https://github.com/LumaPictures/houdini-engine-clarisse [github.com]

but it is for clarisse 2.0, which is very old.
It seems Luma started on it and deserted it. I suspect the Houdini/Clarisse market is simply too small for SESI to expend man-hours on. Therefore, it probably needs to be an open-source project, much like what Luma started.
Isotropix has plainly stated that they will not do it.
https://forum.isotropix.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=3843 [forum.isotropix.com]

Once you see the SpeedTree Engine for Clarisse, you will definitely want to have houdini engine for clarisse.
Check this out:
https://youtu.be/vk8lYq3XsEs [youtu.be]

I'm not sure if it makes sense when LOP is in houdini? You also get free render nodes and all functions are in one package.

Clarisse is a very good product but you get the most out of it in a studio.

The reason why there is no houdini engine for clarrise is mostly userbase. Maya, 3Ds max, unity, unreal all have a huge userbase. It's not cheap to make a plugin so i don't see it happen by sesi or isotropix.

mandrake0
I'm not sure if it makes sense when LOP is in houdini? You also get free render nodes and all functions are in one package.

You pointed out the right thing.

Additionally TOPs seems similar to Clarisse Builder.
So it seems for me that we will get QuasiClarisseBuilder engine in Houdini by SideFX. I guess it will be better for lighter/look-dev guys. When I used Clarisse in production it crashed in every five minutes or so, it was quite frustrating, despite the original goal of the devs was to get away from sw related frustrations.

I don't know how things are going there now, because I completely phased out Clarisse, and I don't want to explain my negative experiences more, I was a big fan of Clarisse then and we had a good relationship with Isotropix. Guys are nice there and I absolutely appreciate the “by artists for artists” stuff, but I'm not the only person who thinks that something went wrong after the 2.0.

Houdini has daily builds and seems much more stable for me, which is, I think, one of or maybe the most underappreciated “feature” of a CG software. H isn't perfect I should say and originally isn't for lighting/lookdev, but LOPs, TOPs, USD/Renderman XPU are coming, and I think it's still better to wait for the scene translate after hitting the render button, than exporting/importing manually all the time from H to C.

If you learn how to use Houdini in a Clarisse-ish way (it's possible at some extent, like this: https://vimeo.com/286184417 [vimeo.com] ), it's even more handy: ie packed primitives for scattering, then you have the much more versatile toolset for controlling all the aspects of the scattering, Shading Layers = Material Style Sheets (again, more opportunities + Redshift handles MSS for a while now) etc.
In a big VFX/animation studio they have pipeline tools and specific people for specific tasks - this is the niche of Clarisse. Actually they flagged Clarisse Bulder with something like: for big studios only (I don't know why…).

Where can we find info on TOPs?

I think it's TOP secret, they removed from the installed docs too…
If you are curious, you may find two help pages in the original release of H17 as I mentioned here: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/58456/?page=1#post-262313 [www.sidefx.com] , just replace the first part of the links with your local equivalents.

There is still stuff in $HFS/houdini/pdg , but these doesn't seem too useful.

In the first H17 release there was a txt file that explaned TOP with also some example setup.

T -> Task

You can create task for all typ of work.

+1 for a Clarisse HE …

I don't know if there is a viable market, or what top secret tech will come in Houdini in the future that would make Clarisse useless, but today, as a single user of both product, I would to have access to some Houdini modeling tools inside Clarisse

PaQ, did you try Redsift in Houdini before?
It depends on the scene complexity vs GPU, but it's worth to try the demo. You can get similar experience to Clarisse if you don't use the 3d viewer. Needs scene translate at the beginning, but not bad, and you get GPU boosted Bracket-Pac-Man

RMan 22 for H has 2018 Q4 target release (khm…), and as I know it'll be similar to Maya port in terms of interactivity…

+1 Houdini Engine for Clarisse

Beyond Dneg, is there any place where it's still the part of the pipeline?
No FMX and subtle Siggraph 2019 presence by Iso…
Things may changed, I think we have better options, like RfH, Pixar just released the second iteration of the rewritten bridge, 22.6.
It seems a Pseudoclarisse engine for Houdini with the live feedback (and more versatile ie live displacement), with Pixar robustness, but haven't try it yet…
https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/RFH22/RenderMan+for+Houdini+22.6 [rmanwiki.pixar.com]

xilofoton
Beyond Dneg, is there any place where it's still the part of the pipeline?
No FMX and subtle Siggraph 2019 presence by Iso…
Things may changed, I think we have better options, like RfH, Pixar just released the second iteration of the rewritten bridge, 22.6.
It seems a Pseudoclarisse engine for Houdini with the live feedback (and more versatile ie live displacement), with Pixar robustness, but haven't try it yet…
https://rmanwiki.pixar.com/display/RFH22/RenderMan+for+Houdini+22.6 [rmanwiki.pixar.com]

Clarisse and Houdini are very different tools, you can’t compare them. I use and love both but I use them for different things. I create assets procedurally in Houdini and use Clarisse for lookdev, layout and rendering.

Although instancing technologies are becoming more popular with the various renderers, I still think that Clarisse is unique in terms of dealing with massive scenes such as mega environments, which is the stuff that I do. At the moment I’m working on a scene in Clarisse that has trillions of polygons, hundreds of UDIM textures, hundreds of regular 4K textures, and I can still work in the viewport in almost real-time and rendering is pretty fast as well.

I have tried Renderman 22.6 for Houdini and was great and have also been using RS. They are great tools but I don’t think you could handle one of those massive environments you can do in Clarisse inside Houdini, at least for the time being (H18 will probably make it possible).

That being said, Houdini engine for Clarisse would make sense to me as it would be incredibly powerful to create variations of the same asset directly inside Clarisse at scattering time.

Yes, they are very different and that's why I appreciate any effort which makes the lookdev/lighting more closer to Clarisse feel. I miss these things you've mentioned since I phased out Clarisse. Except the stability issues (sometimes the next crash came quicker than the scene reload), crazy bugs ( ie. saved project file -> opened again, object jumped , triple check + text editor check -> corrupted coordinates! -> bug report to Iso -> they acknowledged, it's there in the bug tracking system, never encountered with such low level bug). It felt like there is a hardware/memory issue, but the same instability was on different machines. They didn't fixed basic things like file texture node for a while… Maybe it's better now, but it was too much for me then, esp. they advertised it as anti-frustration sw
I decided to move away towards more reliable softwares, and Houdini is definitely a better direction, but it seems if you really want to forget fighting with sw bugs, use practical effects, stop motion animation


I tried Gaffer, but with Appleseed it seems a nightmare candidate for serious work. I'll try it with 3Delight later, which could be a good combo.

Solaris+Karma seems a (ClarisseBuilder+Katana+Gaffer)/3 directly in Houdini, but this is the nth time when we've seen supercool presentation. Clarisse tech demo at Siggraph2012 was also supercool…
I hope that the first iteration of Solaris will be much more matured and reliable than the PDG stuff.

Hello,
From now on I have decided to bump this thread once a year :O)

We need this. Life or dead. Clarisse has capabilities not found in any other software.