I can second these comments about HTOA … Solid Angle’s support is also incredibly responsive. One thing that is a bummer with HTOA is that you will need to purchase a Houdini Engine license for every node on your farm unless all the geometry creation is done before rendering.
This cost be quite steep … essentially a $500 additional cost to each Arnold license. Mantra is quite amazing though and we are trying to figure out if we just use Mantra for most of our Houdini projects. Of course our lighting artists will kick an scream and threaten to jump out the window if forced to use something other than Arnold. … haha. M From: softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-boun...@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Cristobal Infante Sent: Wednesday, August 19, 2015 6:04 PM To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com Subject: Continued use of Softimage question "IPR window shader picking" wow man this is nice, didn't know about this ;) Another good one is that you can assign materials via the IPR windows just by dragging and dropping them onto the objects. The massive plus with mantra, it's deep integration with Houdini means that everything just works out of the box. Even though HTOA is really well implemented is still a plugin and like Sitoa it has the typical arnold caveats (render doesn't update with every move, adding property to objects, etc). Still is pretty awesome to have the options, and it's great to see the pace of development of HTOA. With every release there is always something working 20% faster ;) By the way, has anyone given akeytsu a proper go? On Wednesday, 19 August 2015, Andy Goehler <lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.com<mailto:lists.andy.goeh...@gmail.com>> wrote: 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 <flordli...@gmail.com<mailto:flordli...@gmail.com>> 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 GOGREEN Climate Protection with DHL: please consider your environmental responsibility before printing this email. This email is intended exclusively for the individual or entity to which it is addressed. This communication may contain information that is proprietary, privileged or confidential. If you are not the named addressee, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy or disseminate this message or any part of it. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately by email and delete all copies of the message.
