Best Render Engines for Houdini 2022 (Part 2)

Houdini is a powerful amazing software. Developed by SideFX, it is designed for artists for modeling, rigging, animation, VFX, look development, lighting and rendering in film, TV, advertising and video games, etc. While Houdini comes with the Mantra and Karma renderers, there are many 3rd party rendering solutions available that integrate nicely.

Last week, we have learned 3 render engines of Best Render Engines for Houdini 2022. Let’s find out the remaining 3 render engines today.

V-Ray is a production-proven CPU & GPU rendering software for Architecture, Interior/Product design, Automotive, Video games, VFX and animation. It comes with all the tools artists need to render amazing-looking procedural effects: ray-tracing technology, real-time interactive experiences and 3D content.

Seamlessly integrated into Houdini, it enables smooth scene exchange and iterations between Houdini and other DCC applications such as 3ds Max, Sketchup, Maya, rhino, Revit, Unreal Engine, Cinema 4D, Nuke, Blender.

OS: Windows, Linux, macOS.

CPU: Intel®64, AMD64, or compatible processor with SSE4.2 support.

RAM: Minimum 8 GB RAM, recommended 64 GB RAM. Larger cache memory, higher memory bandwidth and more cores are better.

Houdini: Houdini 17.5 and above (for V-Ray Next), Houdini 18 and above (for V-Ray 5).

GPU:

• NVIDIA CUDA: Maxwell-, Pascal-, Volta-, Turing- and Ampere-based NVIDIA card(s) with the latest recommended video driver.
• NVIDIA RTX: RTX cards with latest recommended video driver.
• V-Ray Production Denoiser: AMD or NVIDIA GPU supporting OpenCL 1.2.
• NVIDIA AI Denoiser: Maxwell, Pascal, Volta, Turing or Ampere-based NVIDIA card with the latest recommended video driver.
• The minimum required to compute capability is 5.2.

$699/year (V-Ray Collection) – $470/year (V-Ray for Houdini)

OctaneRender is an unbiased, spectrally correct GPU render engine. With groundbreaking machine learning optimizations, out-of-core geometry support, massive 10-100x speed gains in the scene graph, and RTX raytracing GPU hardware acceleration, Octane are capable of delivering high quality and fastest speed.

Other than being a standalone software, Octane also seamlessly integrate in Houdini and many leading DCC applications like 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema 4D, Daz 3D, Lightwave, Maya, Modo, Nuke, Revit, Rhino, Sketchup, Softimage, Unity, Unreal Engine and more.

OS: Windows, Linux, macOS.

CPU: Octane does not use the CPU for rendering, a fast multi-core CPU is not required, but it does significantly improve scene-loading speeds.

RAM: Minimum 8 GB RAM, recommended 16 GB RAM.

Houdini: Houdini production builds 15.5, 16.0, 16.5, 17, 17.5, 18.0, 18.5.

GPU: CUDA-enabled NVIDIA video card with support for compute capability 3.0 or higher and the latest driver. Minimum 2GB VRAM.

€199/year (Studio) – €299/year (Enterprise)

3Delight was first available to the public in 2004, and became known as the fastest hybrid REYES/raytracing renderer on the market, largely outperforming the competition. In 2018, a new era begun with the introduction of 3Delight^NSI: a completely new, modern render engine based on the proprietary NSI API and using OSL at core level.

It is one of the fastest & easiest path tracer for multi-core CPU hardware, distributed network & cloud rendering. 3Delight does not require, nor is limited by, any GPU hardware.

It has been used to render full CGI animation and VFX for numerous feature films, TV Series by Netflix, Amazon, HBO, Apple, elaborate TV commercials and much more. 3Delight comes with plug-in integrations for several DCC applications, such as Maya, Houdini, Cinema4D, Katana, Daz Studio.

OS: Windows, Linux, macOS.

CPU: As 3Delight uses 100% CPU, the more threads/cores, the better.

RAM: the more the better.

Houdini: 17.5, 18.0+, 18.5+.

• Purchase: $720 (2 years of technical support assistance and access to all the software updates)
• Subscription: $360/year – $60/month – $30/week

iRender supports Houdini in any version, with any renderers and plugins. Including V-ray, Octane and 3Delight which are introduced above. How can we do that? That’s because we provide high computing performance on the model of IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service), you – our users will take full control of the whole render process, just like your personal computer.

With Powerful Render Nodes: 1/2/4/6/8x RTX 3090 for both Single-GPU and Multi-GPU Rendering, you can easily choose one suitable package for your project demands to speed up the rendering process many times.

High-end configuration: NVIDIA RTX 3090 and AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX @ 3.90GHz, and with reasonable price. However, we are more than that. With a variety of useful features (Fixed Rental, Clone, NV Link, APIs, Process monitoring, etc) and dedicated support from our team, we want to bring to you not only the best quality products but also the most comfortable render time and experience.

So, hesitate no more, let’s REGISTER for an account today to get a FREE COUPON to experience our service and reach a new level of cloud rendering. 20% BONUS for all new users, CHECK IT OUT!

Thank you & Happy Rendering!

Reference source: V-Ray, OctaneRender, 3Delight