Powerful, High-speed cloud render farm for Houdini with Octane render

Houdini is a 3D animation software application developed by Toronto-based SideFX, who adapted it from the PRISMS suite of procedural generation software tools. Houdini’s exclusive attention to procedural generation distinguishes it from other 3D computer graphics software.

Houdini is most commonly used for the creation of visual effects in film and games. It is used by major VFX companies such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, Double Negative, ILM, MPC, Framestore, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Method Studios and The Mill. It has been used in many feature animation productions, including Disney’s feature films Fantasia 2000, Frozen, and Zootopia; the Blue Sky Studios film Rio, and DNA Productions’ Ant Bully.

SideFX also publishes Houdini Apprentice, a limited version of the software that is free of charge for non-commercial use.

For GPU rendering with Houdini we can choose among V-Ray, Redshift, Octane and Arnold GPU. Out of these, Octane is one of the world’s first and fastest GPU-accelerated, unbiased, physically correct renderer. This renderer was developed by a New Zealand-based company called Refractive Software, Ltd in 2008, and was later taken over by the Company OTOY in 2012. Now it is being used in feature films, commercials, and even architectural rendering, including Houdini Side FX.

In today article, lets together find out why iRender could be Powerful, High-speed cloud render farm for Houdini with Octane render.

Processor (CPU)

OctaneRender is a GPU-based engines, so the CPU does not really help in term of rendering process. However, OTOY mentions in their FAQ that “a fast multi-core CPU will significantly improve the scene loading speed.”

Puget System also did a test, and realize that clock speed has the biggest impact on CPU performance with Octane. They recommend those two CPUs:

• Intel Core i7 10700K 3.8GHz (5.1GHz Turbo) 8 Core –This is one of the highest clock speed CPUs available, and does extremely well with both OctaneRender and modeling / animation applications.
• Intel Xeon W-2235 3.8GHz (4.6GHz Turbo) 6 Core – Intel’s Xeon W series processors maintain very high clock speeds and have far more PCI-Express lanes than the consumer-oriented Core series.

Video Card (GPU)

This is the most important factor for performance in OctaneRender. Normally, the render capabilities will be affected by two aspects: the raw speed of the GPU itself and the amount of memory on the card. With large and complex scenes, you will need a good card with decent amount of video memory.

Memory (RAM)

OTOY requires a minimum of 8GB RAM, and recommend 16GB or more. Of course you will need more than that to run multiple software alongside OctaneRender.

Storage (Hard Drives)

The high speed of SSDs allows your system to boot, launch applications, and load files many times faster than any traditional hard drive.

Since the recommended Octane Render for Houdini specifications suggested above, iRender provides 3 types of multi-GPU-servers (6x GeForce RTX 2080 Ti / 6x RTX 3080/ 6x RTX 3090) which are the most effective for Octane rendering in multi GPU cards coming with the following configuration specifications:

These server packages not only surpasses the minimum hardware requirements, but it also exceeds the recommended requirements for Otane:

• These package uses Nvidia GPU cards with a VRAM capacity minimum from 11GB up to 24 GB, which completely exceeds the Octane recommendation of an Nvidia GPU with CUDA compute capabilities 7.0 and 8GB VRAM capacity or higher.
• A RAM capacity ranges from 128GB to 256GB is many times higher than recommended.
• The Dual Xeon E5-2673 v3 processor has also completely met the CPU requirement from Octane. Although Octane mainly depends on GPU performance, some processing stages that occur during post-processing also depend on the performance of CPU, disk or network drive. These include extracting mesh data from your 3D application, loading textures from disk, and preparing scene files for GPU. Depending on the complexity of each scene file, these processing stages can take a considerable amount of time, and as a result, lower-end processors can bottle neck overall rendering performance. Thus, CPU is also considered as one of the criteria that can not be ignored.

As you all know, iRender provides high performance and configurable server system to customers who need to utilize the power of CPU & GPU such as 3D rendering, AI training, VR&AR, simulation, etc. With iRender IaaS and PaaS services, you can access our server through the Remote Desktop Application and do whatever you want and install any software you need on it. It is like you are using your own computer but with a powerful configuration and much higher performance. In particular, you only need to install the software for the first time, the next time you connect to the computer everything is ready for you to use anytime.

1. You can use iRender’s machines to render, and use yours for other purposes (such as designing or editing other files). This could save you time a lot, especially when you have a large project and a deadline is coming.
2. iRender provides you powerful configuration packages with high performance that can speed up your rendering and improve your job quality. These are configurations of multi-card GPU servers that you should take into consideration if you want to have great performance with Octane. And it also depends on the scale of your project to decide which is the most suitable one.
3.  Another great feature that iRender brings to customers is day/ week/month rental packages with high discounts (up to 20% for daily packages, 40% on weekly and 50% monthly packages) which is extremely beneficial for regular long-term users or large projects.
4. Real human 24/7 support service, helping you to handle the problem quickly, effectively, saving you both time and money.