PDG for Design

Ever wanted to have a contact sheet of your design variations? Tired of using third party tools to assemble those? In this tutorial we'll overview the basics of this new context in Houdini then automate the process of creating contact sheets of your renders using PDG/TOPs.

So you're asking yourself "Why would I want to use PDG/TOPs?!". If you're not convinced yet, maybe this straightforward single TOP node setup will convince you. In this tutorial we'll speed up the remeshing of an animated mesh by a factor of ten. Yes, that's x10!

You've got a multicore machine and want even more CPU cores at your disposal? Time to talk about setting up HQueue for distributed PDG. With it you can use the power of your farm not only for rendering but also for simulation, geometry creation, image manipulation... basically anything that's supported in TOPs.

Our CPU farm comes in handy when you're looking to speed up simulations. Which works especially well with FLIP or - in our case - with grains. In this tutorial we'll setup a basic grainsimulation to run distributed using TOPs.

Your simulation is done, you lit it nicely... now let's render the thing! In this tutorial, we'll go over the steps necessary to do distributed rendering of an animation using a third party render engine (Redshift3D) and TOPs.