After watching the H20 Hive…Solaris is looking rather attractive. There’s a lot more Pro’s than Con’s now, in terms of the technical hurdles that USD brings along with it.

SideFX has poured a ton of features into Solaris (that either dont exist, or have a lesser equivalent in SOPs).

eikonoklastes
I am pretty much a solo guy myself and have been using Solaris for my work for over a year now, and I will never want to use the traditional workflow again.

Could you explain what is the benefit of Solaris for you ? I still can’t perceive it as anything other than the fifth wheel in the car.

HGaal

eikonoklastes
I am pretty much a solo guy myself and have been using Solaris for my work for over a year now, and I will never want to use the traditional workflow again.

Could you explain what is the benefit of Solaris for you ? I still can’t perceive it as anything other than the fifth wheel in the car.

What I noticed during my very limited time of using Solaris was how effective it was to separate shot based lighting and render settings.

For two different shots or more, you can create own branch of lighting setups without having to turn on or off camera angle specific lights per shot with very visually easy way.

I got disappointed over the last 2 years with redshift's overall performance. Switched back to Octane which runs pretty stable so far. Plus it's got pretty much all the features needed now (light linking, area light spread, standard surface, aov system) for my solo freelance projects - not really missing anything from rs. I also liked the Octane look a bit better than rs anyway. And there's still Karma if needed.

What about Redshift in Solaris? Anyone use it in there.

back to using Octane as well in Houdini.

Does anyone have performance comparisons? How does Karma XPU stand relative to Redshift, Octane or Cycles in terms of speed?

JalexM
What about Redshift in Solaris? Anyone use it in there.

At the studio I work we have been using it in full production for around a year and works great, Have of course been some bugs along the way. But the Redshift Houdini developer is fast to fix it when reported.

Redshift will become sluggish to update changes if the scene becomes heavy compared to Karma tho.

BTW. Is there set of scene files with few examples from Karma XPU? With Proper settings for lights, materials and render settings? Id love to play with ready to test examples so i can check how fast it is on my old machine. I still learning so i don't know how to setup it in Solaris myself (yet)

Id love to see more advanced scene files for each key element. Like it was with 3Ds MAX. Even reading help file wasn't needed back then

does Redshift work with Houdini 20 docs say only 19.5

dreamblk
does Redshift work with Houdini 20 docs say only 19.5

Yes, H20 support has been there the entire time, even during H20 Beta.

oldteapot7
Id love to see more advanced scene files for each key element. Like it was with 3Ds MAX. Even reading help file wasn't needed back then

These aren't necessarily XPU specific, but most/all of them should give the same result with either engine:

• Solaris Sample Scenes [www.sidefx.com] (USD samples)
  
• Karma User Guide [www.sidefx.com] (hip file used for all images can be found
  

Alluding to other packages examples is nice to know, but not having the same access/experience with 3DS Max it's hard to know what you mean. If you have some concrete, specific examples/links that'd be helpful (whether shared here, or even better, as an RFE we can share with docs/education teams).

I want to know why the bubble warp example is so slow in karma (about 30 mins). It only takes several minutes in RS.

jerry7
I want to know why the bubble warp example is so slow in karma (about 30 mins). It only takes several minutes in RS.

https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/92976/ [www.sidefx.com]
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/93004/ [www.sidefx.com]

I found that when Houdini is started with redshift, redshift will detect all your hard drives, including when you use file cache, it will also frequently detect all hard drives, and you can hear sound from the hard drives, which is not a good thing for the hard drives

JuhaT

HGaal

eikonoklastes
I am pretty much a solo guy myself and have been using Solaris for my work for over a year now, and I will never want to use the traditional workflow again.

Could you explain what is the benefit of Solaris for you ? I still can’t perceive it as anything other than the fifth wheel in the car.

What I noticed during my very limited time of using Solaris was how effective it was to separate shot based lighting and render settings.

For two different shots or more, you can create own branch of lighting setups without having to turn on or off camera angle specific lights per shot with very visually easy way.

Just imagining how you navigate and manipulate data with the advantage of nodes system in sop, while you are dealing with prims, cams,lights,materials etc of a scene just like prims, points,vetercies etc of a geo, and what can you do in obj?

jerry7
I want to know why the bubble warp example is so slow in karma (about 30 mins). It only takes several minutes in RS.

I found this as well, there is nothing fancy and it's unnecessarily slow.The eagle scene is decently good looking and fast tho.

tbay312
Redshift has a brilliant feature that lets you select "low" "mid" and "high" quality render presets. It then goes into your scene, figures out what you have going on, and makes all sorts of intelligent decisions depending on the quality you're after. That feature is fantastic for a freelance artist who may not have the time to dial in all the optimizations required for those different types of renders.

Just came to this post while searching for Karma and Redshift comparison. Where exactly is this feature in Redshift ?



Is it this bucket quality of low, medium, high, very high presets or something else? I always thought that these settings are just presets and just numerical settings.

"Starting with Houdini 20.5, Karma XPU supports adaptive path traced samples via the pixel oracle"

On Karma_Render_Settings go to advanced tab and adjust 'Variance Threshold'.

P.S. It’s always better to manually adjust Redshift samples. In 'Automatic Sampling' mode, RS is typically 25-30% slower.

Antti1999
"Starting with Houdini 20.5, Karma XPU supports adaptive path traced samples via the pixel oracle"

On Karma_Render_Settings go to advanced tab and adjust 'Variance Threshold'.

In my experience XPU variance oracle has so far always been much slower than using Uniform one, which is a bit underwhelming given that it generally uses less samples and therefore worse quality so it should at least be faster
Maybe the variance threshold evaluation is very expensive or probably happens too often so it creates a large overhead and it often results in 3min rendrr to take 6min with variance on, which is unfortunately the default now

But maybe I'm just testing it on too simple scenes so would be interesting to hear if someone has opposite experience