Karma vs Mantra in Houdini : What are the differences?

Houdini is a 3D procedural software for modeling, rigging, animation, VFX, look development, lighting and rendering in film, TV, advertising and video game. It ships with SideFX’s render engines Mantra and Karma.

Then what are the differences between these two renderers in Houdini, and which one should we use for our project? Let’s discover with iRender in this article.

Immortal by Armin Lotfi

Mantra is the highly advanced renderer included with Houdini. It is a multi-paradigm renderer, implementing scanline, raytracing, and physically-based rendering. You should use the physically-based rendering engine unless you have a good reason to use another engine. Mantra has deep integration with Houdini, such as highly efficient rendering of packed primitives and volumes.

On the other hand, Karma is Houdini’s physically-based path tracer, which is deeply integrated with USD (it uses USD as its scene description format and acts as a Hydra render delegate). While it shares some concepts with Mantra, Karma is a completely new renderer intended to replace Mantra for new projects.

Karma has two render engines: Karma CPU, which runs entirely in software on the CPU, and Karma XPU, which uses CPU resources and also takes advantage of the GPU and hardware acceleration. As of Houdini 19, the CPU engine is production-ready, whereas the XPU engine is an alpha-quality preview release.

Together with the release of Houdini 19, SideFX has made a feature comparison between Mantra and Karma CPU/XPU in this newest version. We will take a look at the detailed list below and see how they are different.

To sum up, with Houdini 19, Karma CPU is production-ready while the new engine Karma XPU is in alpha. If you are using Solaris for lighting, you may want to consider using Karma XPU for interactive rendering in the viewport and Karma CPU for final rendering.

The main difference between Karma and Mantra is that Karma works with USD via Solaris/LOPS. Normal scenes must be imported into Solaris in order to render with Karma. Whereas Mantra is production-ready but doesn’t work with USD, and its development is limited to critical bug fixes. Since development time is focused on Karma going forward for Karma to take over as Houdini’s only supported built-in renderer.

However, whether you use Karma or Mantra, you still need a strong workstation to work efficiently and quickly. We offer a more accessible solution for Houdini users to speed up their render or simulation, that is GPU Cloud Rendering. Let’s see how we do it on iRender:

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However, we are more than just powerful configurations. With a reasonable price, a variety of useful features (Fixed Rental, Clone, NV Link, APIs, 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.

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Thank you & Happy Rendering!

Source and video: sidefx.com