Hi
I was wondering what would be the lowest specs in order to run houdini ‘'properly’'.

My main area of interest is low count (100-300 rigid bodies) dynamic simulations, I'm currently using Havok's reactor in max but the limitations are proving time consuming (and pushing me towards a nervous breakdown most of times :-)

I have no great knowledge when it comes to hardware, and since I'm on a pretty limited budget I was wondering if I could perform these kind of simulations in houdini on a ‘'lower’' station set-up than what I see described in this forum (I cannot afford the 4-5k workstations)

Basically I'm interested in knowing what would be the area most benificial for dynamic simulation in houdini… like where should I put the bulk of my money… more ram and lower speed processor or the opposite?

For graphic card, the info I'm getting from various site is even more confusing, some say that higher mainstream card will be better than lower end quadro cards or the complete opposite

Any help in this matter would be greatly appreciated, again my main focus is strickly dynamic simulation, so for instance real time aspect of particules display or viewing trillions of polygons lighted in real time and so on are not important to me

thanks!

If your main concern is simulation you are going to want to blow most of your budget on your CPU. 2-4 gigs of RAM, the fastest CPU possible, and a decent Nvidia card. Doesn't really matter if it's a Quadro or a gaming card. I run Houdini on 4 machines, two with higher end gaming cards (7900 GTS, 8600GTS) and two with Quadros (4500, 2500 mobile) and honestly there's not a real huge difference that I can notice save when intereacting with dense geometry in the viewport with a sculpt SOP or something of that nature. The 8600 I can tell you is deffintiely the slowest, the 4500 is the fastest (not by much), and the 7900 and 2500 seem about the same.

You can build something cheap that will run Houdini well.

thanks, so does dual cpu matter in this aspect or does it gains not much
''puch'' in houdini? for instance at work we have dual xeon workstation but for instance when I run my reactor simulationboth processors are peaking at 50-55% max…. thus I'm not really sure about the gain from dual cpu's

does the dual aspect of CPU matters within the rigid bodies simulation of houdini or is it wasted money?

thanks for you help!

additionally I'm sort of lost into the processor speeds and make… for instance, dell's workstation start off with Single-Core Intel Pentium 4 631 which are priced higher than ‘'mainsreamed’' Intel Core™2 Duo Processor.. and then the top workstations seems to be all xeon based… what is the best ‘'bang’' for the buck towards houdini?

thanks

I don't think the RBDs in Houdini are multithreaded in Houdini 9, but I'm sure someone will correct me if I am wrong. The are many parts of Houdini that can take advantage of multiple procs though, so it's deffintiely worth while to have a dual core machine. If for nothing else, you can solve an RBD simulation on one core and still have use of your machine to do something else.

The Core 2 I think offers the most bang for the buck. I had read a few weeks ago that Intel was going to be slashing prices on them this month, it looks like they did. I'm seeing Core 2 Quads for as low as 260.00 dollars. It's very affordable, however you'll need to really load up the machine with memory to make use of it. I'd recommend at least going with a dual Core so you still can make use of your machine while it solves a sim in the background. So go with a core 2, Duo or Quad is up to you, go 2.33 Ghz or higher.

So you'll spend about 350 or so on a decent motherboard and processor, up to about 3-400 for a really nice video card another hundred on a hard drive, a couple hundred or so for some dual channel memory, 50 dollars or so on a DVD drive. Throw it in a 100 dollar case, install Linux, and you've got a very spiffy workstation for far less than 5,000 dollars.

Thanks! much appreciated

Compaired to Reactor you might find Houdini dynamics are slower, although I wouldn't automatically attribute this to a lack of efficiency, although I haven't done back-to-back comparisons.

It's probably just that since you're normally doing things in DOPs you wouldn't even attempt in Reactor like driving simulations based on particles, doing huge amounts of simulation objects, or animating point properties during simulation that there is usually just more to calculate.

You can also render Dyamics data to hard disk which should eliminate most performance bottlenecks although once again at the expense of interactivity.

I've had similar frustrations with Reactor, it's a game simulation system afterall optimized for speed and interactivity but not accuracy or flexibility, more than anything the fact that it hasn't been very aggressivly updated (or rather not updated). I was also REALLY dissapointed by autodesk's decision not to attempt fluids integration in Max.

Yeah Discreet lack of interest in reactor is downright criminal… Havok's code is actually pretty powerful, as we see it in the game engines, but since discreet haven't updated reactor's tools and UI much in the past friggin 5 YEARS… we can't access much of it… :roll:

Houdini seems better to get into the small details of simulation, as well, it's glue system seems easier than the dreaded reactor's fracture that requires so much tweaking to get nice repercuting & evolving breakage going on…

My main area of interest is destruction simulation, basically whatever is too complex to handle in real-time in the engine is ‘'pre-baked’' and brought in as a simple animated mesh… I don't think I'll be ‘'pushing the limit’' of houdini's simulation compared to what they are doing for feature film with it…