How long before Karma will be a serious replacement for Redshift in Houdini?

How long? H20

After all it's not only renderer alone. Also viewport to renderer communication that redshift and other renderers will not be able to keep up compared to native karma.
Just an example is reflections/refractions in viewport, and how much they coincide with final render result. and many other things like heterogenous volumes and how much they look same as in final rendered result.
In other words it's always better to stick with native renderer and it's the best one in most of the cases, I'm sure Karma will be that renderer everyone will like more than others in Houdini.

Karma for sure
Redshift has become really bad, bugs like features and slow development

I think it will be different for everyone. But for me at the moment I find Karma XPU to be unusable because of the constant shader compiling. Redshift is way more interactive and quick for me. But in the recent siggraph talk they acknowledged this issue and it sounds like it will be improved a lot in H20.

Ralph Pinel
How long before Karma will be a serious replacement for Redshift in Houdini?

I think it already is. At least in my testing it generally generates sharper and better looking results, and it's faster on things like translucency. Karma is still lacking some very key features though, but it seems most of what I miss will come now with H20.
Specifically talking about Solaris + Karma though, and outputting USD files to render.

I run a small team of 8 animators, and I absolutely see Karma can do most of our jobs. Especially as long as the render licenses stays free it's almost a no-brainer to use Karma. We have a cloud farm on AWS, so being able to just spin up what you need in the moment is a huge benefit.

I've had nothing but major issues with Redshift, both in C4D and Houdini, across multiple versions. Crashes, slow to update, buggy, requires annoying workarounds.

Additionally, Maxon customer service blows and it seems you're relegated to the bottom of the pile if you're not a paying C4D user.

I've been using Cycles as a replacement and it's been fantastic, stable and responsive. As I transition towards a 90%+ Houdini workflow, Karma XPU is the way forward for me.

Very excited for H20.

Interesting! I have been experiencing a lot of bugs and crashes with Redshift. Thats what promted me to ask the question. It always seems to happen when a bigger brand buys up specialist tech and fail to continue the quality of development.
Karma H20 could be the moment we can shift back to Houdini native rendering.

Karma (native) or Redshift (third party)?

I’ve not been rendering for a long time, but previously been testing both RendeMan and Cycles. However, going forward I do consider native renderers to be better than third party ones.

For example when you deal with fine data such as geometry attributes, mesh types and more there can always be translation issues (and crashes) with third party.

As opposed to having rendering only as a late step in the pipe it can be used early also. I like the idea of working with a native renderer already in the modeling process. There are shaders that can do things more efficiently than using mesh definitions everywhere, such as bevels, creases and displacement and you just want control and confidence with that.

Although Cycles is great (and free) moving data can be a bottleneck.

So I’m exited that SideFX did the great move to develop this.

Karma does not have adaptive sampling…yet

I like Karma but at the moment it feels very very slow compared to Redshift. I'm not talking about the rendering speed itself but about the loading time whenever you make a change.

In pretty much all of my scenes, when I add a new node into the shader it takes quite a while before the render updates. In the current scene that I'm working on, and it is not that complex a scene, it takes 30 seconds whenever I insert a new MaterialX node. Changing parameters on existing nodes is instant, but modifying the shader is so slow it'll drive me insane one of these days.

And forget about having live procedural geometry in the scene, Houdini will just constantly re-calculate those SOP trees, it's impossible to work with unless I have a dummy file cache at the end of every single procedural SOP object. Not sure if this is a LOPs problem or a Karma problem. I don't have the issue with Redshift, but I don't use Redshift in LOPs.

Digipiction
when I add a new node into the shader it takes quite a while before the render updates

This is the compiling of new shaders.
we've improved this a lot for H20

brians
This is the compiling of new shaders.
we've improved this a lot for H20

H20 goodies, more, MORE !!!

brians
This is the compiling of new shaders.
we've improved this a lot for H20

Great news, looking forward to it!

brians

Digipiction
when I add a new node into the shader it takes quite a while before the render updates

This is the compiling of new shaders.
we've improved this a lot for H20

Any chance we can get a 'compile all' option like other GPU Engines have?

I'd rather pay that cost during Houdini install or Startup or maybe even a command line tool, for example - just some way to pay that cost one time - all at the same time.

TwinSnakes007
Any chance we can get a 'compile all' option like other GPU Engines have?

I like this idea as well, so I'd say "probably".
Given timelines, it might have to come after the H20 release though, in a daily build or something.

TwinSnakes007

brians

Digipiction
when I add a new node into the shader it takes quite a while before the render updates

This is the compiling of new shaders.
we've improved this a lot for H20

Any chance we can get a 'compile all' option like other GPU Engines have?

I'd rather pay that cost during Houdini install or Startup or maybe even a command line tool, for example - just some way to pay that cost one time - all at the same time.

What other GPU Engines have that option? I don't think redshift or cycles have them. But those are the only ones I have experience in.

Redshift and Cycles compiles all on 1st render. Vray has a button to compile all (at least it used too, before it was multithreaded). Karma compiles per-feature on-demand.

Kernels have to be recompiled with each new GPU driver install or new GPU engine install.

Gotcha, I wish the button was a feature on all of them. If Karma does then that's even better, even though I was going to switch from Redshift to Karma anyways when H20 drops.

There’s also RenderMan XPU - but its so brittle, if you blink to hard it will crash to desktop - but that Denoiser - there’s nothing close to it and its temporal too.

I think once Karma XPU gets adaptive sampling and per-object sampling overrides - it will really be a great contender in the market.

Apart from Cycles I have not seen a renderer is doing well in both CPU and GPU. Maybe Karma can go into similar places. Did I get it right that Karma can dynamically switch to CPU if GPU runs out of Ram?