Indie Restrictions & ORC

[labmeta]

Hi Jaunjo,

I've seen mention of this in another thread that the reason Houdini Indie cannot export ORBX or send jobs to the ORC is down to the 4k Resolution Limit imposed by SideFX.
It makes total sense, I see why it's ended up this way but it's really dissapointing that indie studios, probably the people that need render farm support the most cannot access it due to this implementation.

I don't want to render anything above the 4k resolution limit, but working in animation i just need more render power than i can accommodate in the office here - i have a lot of frames to render!

Is this the only solution there is to the issue?

Is there some way that between yourself, otoy and SideFX there is a better way to manage this so we can at least have some ORC support? yet still stay within our license restrictions?

Thanks for listening,

Paul

[juanjgon]

Yes, sorry, this is a limitation in the Houdini Indie license for third-party renderers. The plugins can't export scene files to be rendered offline or in the cloud. I'm afraid that all the Indie third-party renderers have the same limitation. Be aware that Mantra has the same limitation ... from Indie you can't export Mantra IFDs files to be rendered offline or in the cloud, so probably requesting this feature for the third-party renderers makes no sense for SideFX.

You could try to find a render farm service that could render your Indie .hiplc files directly in their system (something that I'm not sure if it is allowed by Otoy, to be honest), or you could try to rent GPU virtual machines in the cloud to install there your Houdini/Octane licenses (something that also, to be honest, doesn't sound easy).

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[keviny]

Many virtual machines run into issues with Octane.

[labmeta]

Houdini Indie + Mantra can render on the cloud though. You can use AWS without problem through HQueue (although i note AWS is temporarily broken for Hqueue)

The manual states "Houdini Apprentice and Houdini Indie can both render on the cloud, with the same restrictions as rendering locally."

I'm legitimately looking for a way to manage a rendering job! I assume the restrictions on the ORBX export is because there is no way to limit the export size once it's exported? Is that the jist of it? If so must be a way to manage this more sensibly?

Thanks,

Paul