Maybe someone from SideFX could give me a hint, I love mantra, but I’m a indie user, living in Argentina, I need a faster engine. Should I wait to mantra gpu (I would love this, even if you need to pay more for it) or should I forget that dream and buy redshift or Octane or whatever I chose when I need that speed. The times of the real market is confronting all the time whit Mantra. Now clients want 4K and it is madness.
Thanks.

I spent a year trying to get reasonable output out of Mantra. I finally bought Redshift and have not looked back. I doubt Mantra will ever be GPU based (perhaps accelerated maybe). Redshift recently extended their filesize output to include 4K with an Indie license so that is good news as well.

Enivob
I spent a year trying to get reasonable output out of Mantra. I finally bought Redshift and have not looked back. I doubt Mantra will ever be GPU based (perhaps accelerated maybe). Redshift recently extended their filesize output to include 4K with an Indie license so that is good news as well.

Do you know if there are any decent tutorials or training for Product renders for Redshift/Houdini? Maybe some basic animation too.

if you need it now, definitely go Redshift, you can be productive immediately
Redshift is decently implemented in Houdini and the learning curve is not that steep, you can also try the trial first and see if it fits your needs

since there is no info on new Mantra and/or what that GPU everywhere hints from siggraph mean, I wouldn't just wait if you have projects and clients to satisfy now

Has anyone tried Vray that just came out for Houdini?

VRay for Houdini is still currently in beta. It mostly works well… if you're used to VRay in other engines there are still some strange bits to get used to like the way AOVs/Render Elements are constructed, but it otherwise feels familiar. It's not as fast as Redshift by a long shot, but it's plenty stable and it does benefit from GPU acceleration if you have the hardware.

I was using Mantra for a while but after switching to Redshift I don't think I will go back. Much faster rendering despite some inconveniences. For an indie user like me it is perfect and well worth the money.

Redshift all the way. Most of the time it's many orders of magnitude quicker than Mantra, which is very beneficial for look-dev and iterating on materials/lighting. Mantra is great, but it's not at all viable for animation without a decent renderfarm. There are some drawbacks to Redshift that come with being a third party renderer, but on the whole I think it's the best option for many users.

Regarding V-Ray: V-Ray itself is a fine product, but I think I have some issues with Chaos Group.
They don't seem to have a good system for keeping track of licenses. We lost access to our V-Ray Next for Maya licenses when it went from Beta to Gold and had to get in touch with support to get them re-instated. They took about a week to respond and fix the problem. Their FAQ states that you should contact support to get access to free upgrades for V-Ray 3 to V-Ray Next if you are on an annual subscription. Why would that access not be granted automatically for subscription licenses?
The user account you use as a customer doesn't work on the Chaos Group forums. You need to create a separate forum account. When you create that forum account, you can't actually post on the forums because you need to email their support for posting access (took two or three days). The forum itself, for some reason is broken down into about EIGHTY subforums for V-Ray alone. It's all just so idiotic. Another thing I have an issue with is that you pay for each DCC implementation separately. With Redshift you can use the same license for any of the supported DCCs.

I have not used Octane, but even if it was comparable to Redshift I would avoid it, simply based on my impression of Otoy as a company. I don't have patience any more for poor support/customer service.

Apologies, that definitely turned into more of a rant than I was intending.

I have been using Redshift for a while and love it. I looked at Octane, but I got the impression that it would not support using custom attributes.
I have HQueue working, but have not gotten Redshift to work. Has anyone successfully used Redshift on a client machine, using HQueue?

bradcarvey
Has anyone successfully used Redshift on a client machine, using HQueue?

We use RS and Hqueue here at Lost Boys. Are you putting in the RS env vars in the hqueue ROP? We hid the “execute” button on the hqueue ROP and replaced it with a button that sources a file to populate the env var section of the ROP, then presses the real “execute” button.