Hi Francois, all Houdini projects so far have been rendered using Mantra. For our type of work we’ve found it performing very well in comparison with Arnold. Here’s are some of my day to day time savers:
distributed rendering being able to use the farm on a single frame during lighting is great artist friendly lights I have my shortcomings with Arnolds lights, mainly either controlling the spread on area lights or texturing spots to get realistic specs mouse cursor bucket picking sounds trivial, saves me so much time IPR window shader picking ctrl clicking in the render view brings up the properties of that pixels shader. click -> adjust -> done. That being said, we’re keeping an eye on HtoA and I try to set up new projects with Arnold as well and run a comparison. > On Aug 19, 2015, at 16:39, Francois Lord <[email protected]> wrote: > > Hi Andy. > > Did you move to Mantra, or stayed with Arnold? > > Softimage crashing too often in lookdev is the #1 reason why I'm actively > looking elsewhere. > > On 19-Aug-15 10:35, Andy Goehler wrote: >> We at Fiftyeight moved on from Softimage to Houdini for scene assembly and >> rendering. While Houdini’s offerings may not be the designed/perfect pass >> system currently, we’ve managed to adjust to a level of comfort. Shading and >> lighting productivity has gone way up. Houdini has proven to be very stable >> during shading and lighting, contrary to my frustration with Soft crashing >> unacceptably often. >> >> We were not looking for the best solution currently available either, we >> were looking for a platform to build upon. And are very happy with Side >> Effects as a software vendor. Licensing, Bugs reports and fixes, feature >> requests and implementation and daily builds make us a satisfied customer. >> >> Andy >
