OTOY Forums

Hi Juanjo,
I am evaluating 2 options for renderfarm :
1 - render directly inside houdini without generating .orbx archive, by using directly Hengine + Octane.
2 - export .orbx throw ROP and render directly the .orbx in Octane without using Hengine.

1 -> is more straightforward, but unlike in Maya, Houdini ask for 795$ per batch rendering license. So you have to combine the cost of an octane license + Hengine license for each rendering machine.
2 -> you have to wait for exporting your geo, but you don't have additional cost, and you are also ready to go to export to ORC on the cloud.

For the moment i would like to go with option 2) cause lower cost + ability to lunch on ORC sound better to me. BUT i need to be sure that the .orbx exporter is full featured to make it happen.
So do you think that i can safely go with option 2) and fully rely on the ROP exporter to translate everything from :

- geo + material
- cv/hair + material
- volume/field + material
- instances/particles + material
- lights / render settings

Or are there any area of the exporter that are still work in progress ? and that would force me to render them in Houdini ?
in that case what would be the things i can't export for now safely ? And what are the things that can be trusted at 100% ?

Thanks for your support !
Cheers
E

As far as I know, and in theory, you can export to animated .orbx files (that means, a single .orbx file including the whole sequence) any scene that can be rendered in "scene update" mode. If your scene somehow must be rendered using the "full scene reload" mode, you are going to need to export a single .orbx file for each frame, probably using a rendering script.

Hope it helps,
-Juanjo

Thanks for your answer juanjo !
That would be great to be able to have in the futur : directly in the ROP the option to save as one .orbx for all frame OR one .orbx per frame.
Cheers
E