Powerful Houdini and Arnold Cloud Rendering service

Houdini is a 3D animation software application developed by SideFX. Houdini is most commonly used in FX departments for the creation of visual effects in film and game. It is used by major VFX companies such as Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, Double Negative, ILM, MPC, Framestore, and others. Houdini has been used in various feature animation productions, including Disney’s feature films Fantasia 2000, Frozen and Zootopia; the Blue Sky Studios film Rio, DNA Productions’ Ant Bully as well.

Arnold is an advanced Monte Carlo ray tracing renderer designed from the ground up to efficiently process the complex geometric datasets required for feature-length CGI animation and big-budget visual effects.

Arnold for Houdini (or HtoA) provides a tight bridge to the Arnold renderer from within the standard Houdini interface. It enables smooth lighting workflows between Houdini and other DCC applications since setups can be exported and shared.

In this articles today, let’s explore powerful Houdini and Arnold cloud rendering service with iRender!

Arnold for Houdini holds many features which can help you to achieve a smooth workflow as well as its strength in realistic rendering results. Some features can be referred below:

• • • • All Arnold cameras (perspective, orthographic, spherical, fisheye) with depth of field and advanced shutter controls.
      • All Arnold lights (point, distant, spot, quad, disk, cylinder, skydome, mesh) with light filters and accurate viewport representation.
      • Custom Arnold shading network context with a comprehensive list of 106 shaders and utilities.
      • Atmospheric and background effects.
      • Volume rendering with support for OpenVDB and particles.
      • Polymeshes, curves, points with support for displacement and bump mapping and subdivision.
      • Procedurals, with sample Alembic and mandelbulb implementations.
      • Accurate motion blur (transform, deform, velocity, acceleration), overridable per object.
      • Geometry attributes translation as user data.
      • Optional Arnold properties for objects and cameras.
      • Render to AOVs, in single or separate files.
      • Support all Houdini rendering contexts (render region, mplay, render viewer, render COP, batch), with support for AOVs and clickable buckets.
      • Interactive rendering (IPR) allows parameter changes to be rapidly previewed without interrupting your work.
      • Instancing.
      • Multi-camera renders.
      • DeepEXR support.

iRender provide to you high performance and configurable server system for 3D rendering, AI Training, VR & AR, simulation, etc. We believe that design and creative activities are private and personal that only you artists will know what you want with your animation. That’s the reason why we provide remote servers so that you can install any software you need, and do whatever you like with your project.

You will only need to install your software for the first time, and next time you connect to the computer everything is ready for use.

Because Arnold now can utilize the power of GPU rendering (from version 5.3 or HtoA 4.0.0), we have established some of the fastest server packages with RTX4090.

You can see that our configurations above are all more than enough to have a project in Houdini with Arnold renderer run smoothly. RAM is 256GB and Storage is NVMe SSD with 2TB, your project will run more stable when you open it with other software and programs.

Moreover, processor is AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 3955WX or 5975WX. We all know that the clock speed of a CPU will decide your scene to load faster or not. To ensure you have a better experience and minimize all CPU bottleneck, these CPU have from 3.6 to 3.9GHz.

Come to a very important factor: Graphics card (GPU). Although Nvidia said that RTX4090 is gaming card, we all know that it’s one of the best choice for rendering at the moment.

Arnold performs rather good on RTX4090.

Redshift and Blender only run about 70% faster when compared RTX4090 to RTX 3080Ti, and about 55% faster if you compare RTX4090 to RTX 3090Ti.

The graphics card RTX4090 does a little bit better when rendering in Arnold, the speed is 80% and 64% faster than RTX 3080Ti and RTX 3090Ti relatively.

There is a comparison from TechGage which features RTX 3090. They render two scenes “Jaguar E-Type” and “Sophie” with many graphics card, using Arnold for Maya MtoA 5.2.1.1.

In both scenes, RTX 4090 renders faster than RTX 3090 about 75-78%. It’s not quite double like it could do with Octane or V-Ray, judging from the fact that it couldn’t with RTX 3080Ti. However, it’s still a massive reduction in render time.

There is one thing about Arnold that iRender has learned from many users of ours, is that Arnold doesn’t scale up good when it comes to multi-GPUs rendering. They have told me that Arnold doesn’t know how to work with GPU or multi-GPUs properly.

It could come from the fact that Arnold is the renderer used for film production, with a very high quality. The project in Arnold could be so complicated that your GPU is not strong enough to proceed. That’s why Arnold will behave weird, or cannot render. Some suggestions for that are optimizing your scene, using a different graphics card (Autodesk suggests NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 24GB or above), or rendering in CPU.

Plus, on iRender, we provide you more support than just those config.

• Free and convenient transferring tool

iRender offers a powerful and free file transfer tool: iRender GPU. With fast file transfer speed, large data capacity, and completely free. You can transfer all the necessary data into our iRender GPU tool at any time without connecting to the server. The data will be automatically synchronized in the Z drive inside the server, ready for you to use.

• Flexible price

Beside hourly rental, you can always save 10% with our Rental Plan feature. For those who’s in need of server more than a day, or have extremely large project, we advise to choose daily/weekly/monthly rental package. The discount is attractive (10% for 3hrs/6hrs/daily/weekly/monthly plan), and you don’t have to worry about over-charging if you forget to shutdown the server.

• Real human support from 6:00 to 24:00

Users can access to our web-based online platform and using multiple nodes to render at the same time. Hence, with us, it does not matter where you are present – as long as you are connected to the internet, you can access and enjoy the 24/7 rendering services that we provide, and if you meet any issue, our real human support team is always ready to support you from 6:00 to 24:00 (GMT +7) every day.

• Rendering service supports powerful RTX4090

When you use iRender, you can free your computer during the hardest and most arduous part – rendering. That is also the reason that Render Farm service is becoming more and more popular and essential. However, as far as we know, iRender is proud to be one of the very few rendering service that support powerful RTX4090 for Arnold for Houdini with relatively reasonable price.

With the above advantages Houdini and Arnold Cloud Rendering and the machine configuration package that iRender has just released, we believe that Houdini and Arnold users will have the most comfortable, quickest, and most effective rendering time.

Register an account today to experience powerful Houdini & Arnold Cloud Rendering Service. Or contact us via WhatsApp: (+84) 916806116 for advice and support.

Thank you & Your Renders, Your Rules!

Source: sidefx.com, arnoldrenderer.com