In Houdini 18 Mantra accelerated?

In Houdini 18, SideFX will introduce Karma in Beta, as a replacement for Mantra. Initially, Karma will not be GPU accelerated, but it is positioned to do so over time.

Mantra is dead on arrival in H18

goat
Mantra is dead on arrival in H18

Only if the Karma beta is relatively functional…

goat
Mantra is dead on arrival in H18

Why did you decide to kill the Mantra (replace)? Will a video card work in Karma? How much does speed differ from Renshift?

iskan
Why did you decide to kill the Mantra (replace)? Will a video card work in Karma? How much does speed differ from Renshift?

Goat doesn't speak for SideFX, and neither do I. I think it was a bit of a hyperbole.

I like to think of Karma as Mantra 2.0, but smartly the SideFX team isn't getting rid of it until Karma is fully 100% production ready, which I suspect it won't be in this release.

Karma is not GPU-based, at least not yet. There are enough hints which lead us to believe it might be in the future, but right now it's 100% CPU (like Renderman).

Regarding speed comparisons with Redshift, we'll need to wait until it's in our hands. I suspect it won't be as fast as Redshift for most things, but in some things it might be. Even Mantra can be faster than Redshift for certain things like volumetrics for instance.

I only saw Karma inside of Solaris, but I guess it is, like mantra, available as a renderer in the standard Houdini OUT context?

give me Karma Sutra already!!!

inconsequential, but the mame change bothers me a bit for some reason. I wish they'd kept the Mantra name and maybe add Karma as a codename.