Houdini 16 Tweet

[C-You]

Hi juanjgon,

as you know the new Houdini 16 is a beast and there are so many changes - so a few questions to octane related things:

1. Is Houdini 16 supported from its release day? Also the Indie version?

2. Are all the new things like terrain, boolean shatter and ocean procedurals supported, because these very cool new things are all related to the new VOP procedurals shaders?

3. Is there a way to get the new great shader VOP node system with the procedural nodes like displacements and hightfields as inputs into octane 3.1?

4. Are you working right now to get a direct substance support for Houdini 16?

5. Is the odd Mplay for OS X changed, so we have same functionality like IPR?

6. Is there a way in H16 to get camera, light, polys combined with all needed passes for beauty/matte and so on as an export file interface into After Effects? - this would open a very big missing door from Houdini.

[juanjgon]

Hi,

Yes, Houdini 16 will be supported from the first day. In fact, the plugin code has been updated and is currently working fine with the H16 beta versions, without problems so far.

The new terrain objects could be rendered with Octane if converted to polygon meshes. The booleans should work without problems. The new hair system is not supported yet but will be supported in the near future using the SOP geometry hair mode. Probably support the new infinite ocean procedural will not be possible, because it is a Mantra procedural, hard to support in other engines.

Octane only can work with its own VOP nodes, at least currently. Perhaps new nodes to support some of the Houdini VOPs could be possible once we have the OSL feature to write custom shaders, but it's early to say.

I know that the substance raw textures can be used to build an Octane shader tree compatible with the substance workflow. I'll investigate if the direct conversion of the substance files to these Octane node trees is possible, but I am not sure at all.

At some point, I want to improve the features of the MPlay IPR (picking functions and so on, even perhaps include the IPR in the Houdini render view panel), but the OpenGL IPR available in the Windows and Linux versions is not going to be supported in OSX because unfortunately, the graphics lib used to manage the OpenGL IRP code is no longer supported in OSX since several OSX versions. I need to replace it with another lib, but this is going to be a huge work, so I don't have an ETA for it.

The plugin has all the export options available in Octane, related to alembic files, .orbx scenes, render passes, render layers, etc. But export a complete scene using the After Effects file type is not possible.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[C-You]

Thanks a lot for clear things up - you provide the fastest support - as usual !

Great to get our hands on H16 from day one ...

[derekhanz]

In Houdini 16 Mantra supports nested dielectrics. Will Octane also have this PBR functionality?

[juanjgon]

As you can image, Octane has it's own shading system, so the nested dielectrics is a feature that must be supported by Octane. The Mantra features can't be used with Octane.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[Janmansilver]

Hi Juan, looking forward to macOS version with improved IPR. Just switched back to Mac.

[C-You]

Hi juanjgon,

I have downloaded and installed the new beast 16.0.504.20 right in this moment.

You have stated we are able to run at day of H16 release - where I can find the right OR build for OS X 16.0.504.20 ? - the current one is for H15.5

In the downloaded H16 Folder was another alias folder with same icons as in the Houdini build folder - I have deleted
the alias one and hope it was correct to do and not a bad thing - H16 started normally.

So is the OR install same process like H15.5 ?

[juanjgon]

The next plugin version, that I want to release later this week, will have a build for the just released Houdini 16. I'm just updating the plugin code to support also the new Octane 3.06 features in the same release.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[dsedov]

Great! Can't wait.

[C-You]

Thanks for your quick reply - as always - so we have to wait a little and
play with the beast in the meantime.

Just seeing the release of 3.06 instead of 3.1 shows us clearly that there
is a long way to go - but 3.1 would be so important with AS and denoise.

After purchase last summer I thought to get 3.1 at end 2016 - but now
I think that OR 4 will not arrive in 2017 outside a dirty beta with all the
test month always following - sad, that OTOY not hire more DEVs, because
I think OR 4 will be a killer if there is really something near realtime. And at
the moment Redshift and Arnold (GPU announced) are around the corner
and I ask me if we will get as easy attribute support in 3.1?