Tips for faster rendering in Houdini with iRender

Houdini, a powerful 3D animation software by SideFX, has become an industry standard for visual effects and simulations. It’s a useful tool for anyone in the visual arts and 3D modeling. Graphic designers, animators, 3D artists, and people creating models can all benefit from the Houdini suite of software.

Although Houdini has its own rendering engine, Mantra, rendering times can significantly slow down a project when using advanced graphics tools such as Houdini SideFX. Is it possible for this software to render more quickly? In this blog, iRender will discuss some tips to help you render Houdini more quickly.

Houdini SideFX is a 3D animation software used in various industries, such as modeling, rigging, animation, VFX, look development, lighting, and rendering in film, TV, advertising, and video games. It is known for its powerful simulation tools, advanced particle effects, and fluid dynamics. SideFX is a company that provides technical support and training for Houdini users. 

Houdini has been used by almost all the major VFX companies including Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, DreamWorks, and Sony Pictures Imageworks. Houdini is now one of the primary tools in the VFX industry, finding applications in TV, films, and the broader 3D industry. 

Image source: SideFX 

Switch to GPU Rendering

The primary function of the GPU is to provide faster image rendering. It uses a graphics card for rendering rather than a traditional CPU.

Since a GPU is far more powerful than a CPU, it can handle numerous tasks on your computer at once. Even Houdini Mantra will be enough for some of the projects with additional optimizations, huge projects still need GPU-accelerated rendering with additional software. 

Optimize caches and attributes

Make sure that each simulation you build takes advantage of caching. With the use of caches, your simulation can be stored in a Houdini native. bgeo file format. You may save time by playing back your creations and making modifications more quickly by caching your simulation. You can see any details in your simulation more precisely thanks to caching as well. You should also add an attribute delete node before your cache file. In doing so, you can delete any attributes that may slow down the caching time of your simulation.

Choose the Fitting Render Engine

Houdini comes with its built-in advanced rendering engine called Mantra which allows you to switch between multiple rendering engine options. Besides, there are several options available to help you render your Houdini projects more quickly. For your Houdini projects, some of the primary choices include Arnold, Redshift, and V-Ray. For smaller projects, the Houdini Mantra alone will suffice with further optimizations. 

However, larger projects still require GPU-accelerated rendering using an additional piece of software.

Enable Active Radius

If your project contains a lot of light-colored items, those effects most likely also cause rendering times longer. Also, if it’s not possible to reduce the number of lights in your project, you can enable Active Radius for the light object shaders. It will not affect the outside radius of the light object and dramatically decrease your rendering duration.

Optimize Geometry

Optimize Geometry in Houdini refers to the process of improving the performance and precision of geometry in a 3D model. This can involve tasks such as reducing the number of polygons, improving the quality of normals, or smoothing edges. By optimizing geometry, animators can improve the speed and efficiency of their workflows, as well as achieve more accurate and realistic visual effects. There are various tools and techniques available in Houdini for optimizing geometry, including the Geometry panel, the Subsurface panel, and the UV Layout panel. To achieve faster rendering times and streamline your workflow, you can:

• Reducing unnecessary subdivisions
• Eliminating unseen geometry
• Utilizing procedural techniques.

Disable Unnecessary Features

You can increase the efficiency of 3D rendering by disabling features and effects that are not necessary such as changing the rendering parameters for motion blur, depth of field, or global lighting. This increases rendering speed without affecting quality. The workflow is improved by disabling unused features, which permits quicker iterations, simpler editing, and instant feedback. Additionally, it makes the best use of computer resources and gives editors the ability to adjust the final results.

Use Render Farm

A render farm is a huge collection of machines harnessed together to render frames simultaneously, significantly speeding up the process.

Render farms offer several benefits for rendering, such as having access to powerful computers, having the capacity to render multiple objects at once, and having the flexibility to increase or decrease resources as needed. They make rendering faster by dividing the work among many machines.

Houdini is friendly to all render farms, making them widely supported across most cloud render farms now. iRender is such a render farm offering high configurations of machines with high-end specifications. You can easily integrate iRender cloud rendering into your workflow, resulting in more effective rendering for your Houdini projects.

About us

iRender is a perfect option to render projects in PC optimization for rendering tasks, CGI, and VFX with over 30.000 customers and is highly appreciated in global rankings. To bring the best experiences for customers, iRender has been improving the quality and updating the newest technology every day. We provide high-configuration dedicated servers (physical computers/machines) specifically optimized for GPU rendering.

Why you should choose our service

Full Control

We offer highly powerful computers that are set up and ready for GPU rendering. You have total control and flexibility over the devices you use when you use our service. As a result, you are free to customize your creative workstation. You can select a GPU machine to begin rendering from a variety of options, ranging from a single RTX 4090 to multiple 2/4/6/8x RTX 4090.

Save your time and money

Houdini is GPU-based renderer. This means that the graphic cards (or GPUs) in your system will affect how long the renders take to finish. Additionally, the Houdini GPU improves render rates dramatically and scales very well with many GPUs. Therefore, the more GPUs there are, the faster and better the result rendered will be. 

Our website makes all of our machine configurations available to the public. To learn more about the configuration and price, visit Here

Let’s check out the rendering performance in Houdini on our 8x RTX 3090 machines.  

In case you have any problems or questions, don’t hesitate to contact the 24/7 support team. We will be happy to help you with your questions and problems at all times.

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Register an account today to experience our service or contact us via email at [email protected] or WhatsApp: at (+84) 912075500 for advice and support.

iRender – Happy Rendering!