el_diablo

Even though there wasn't much in the terms of Rendering feature updates, the tease at the end of the launch event mentioning LOPs is real intriguing. I'm sure SideFX will do a stellar job once its released, so a lot to look forward to.

Everything else got a nice update and H17 will be a again a release that pulls in more users in my opinion.

I will just say that on a show I was previously part of we had 2x better render times (mantra) than current one (vray), with comparable look and complexity. The difference is one had senior artists setting up everything and using cheats wherever possible, while the current one is vray with basic setup + GI. GI in Mantra is not currently its best selling point. I'm quite sure SideFX is looking into this for upcoming release as major Mantra developments were in quite a few releases back. Also LOPs [forums.odforce.net], if its true they are Lighting operators and it moves Houdini+Mantra into Katana territory, the future is bright (GI added).

You are iterating across all primitives and then in a foreach loop over all primitives in a group each time. So for each primitive you are setting it to 1 exactly N times of the length of the group array. I would think thats not what you are trying to do . Rethink logic, or do everything in a detail wrangle to run only once.