Hi, anybody currently running Houdini on laptops? does it absolutely need to be a workstation class laptop or is anybody succefully running it on “mainstream” models? thanks

I think the answer to that lies in how broadly you're willing to stretch the definition of ‘run’.

3d animation is a task that typically challenges every major aspect of the hardware: disk access, ram, network bandwidth, video, etc.

If you are looking to schlep around flying logos, then a laptop will probably perform fine, but for any modern ‘broadcast quality’ datasets, you are probably going to want something with a little (read: lots) more oomph.

G

Im running houdini on a 10" samsung nc10 netbook with 1024 x 600 res, here is a screenshot in actual size of the the UI:



you can reduce the size of the UI in edit>preferences>general user interface and then on the bottom you have a global UI size dropdown list where you pick small.

The only problem is that laptops with integrated graphics can only use OEM drivers, so it cant handle openGL shaders, I have to set an environment variable to turn off shader support.

Here's what I do so I can use houdini from my piece of #$&* laptop…. get a good desktop pc that can run houdini well and then connect to it remotely using logmein.com (I've found the default windows remote desktop doesn't work well with houdini as it doesn't work right with rendering)

This works pretty well for me as long as the internet connection for the laptop and for the desktop is pretty fast… you notice a bit of lag sometimes and I wouldn't recommend this for doing modeling but for any other type of work its fine since you're just moving pieces around in a scene and such and setting parameters.

You can use modeling programs like rhino, moi (nurbs) and silo (poly) that will run pretty well even on older laptops and then send it over to your desktop to do the visfx part in houdini.

I ran Houdini on an old laptop for a while. It's good to test out techniques and optimization.

Thanks for the replies, I do run Houdini on a workstation desktop but I also need to do remote work (mainly in dynamic simulation) other than the graphic cards, the hardware in workstation class laptop are not necesseraly that much better conpared to the high different in price… if Houdini can run on lower card specs, like let's say an ati mobility HD 4570 it's a huge saving in cost…