Houdini Render Farm

Megarender has been working in the rendering industry for over seven years and is one of the leaders in 3DS MAX cloud rendering. We have been offering rendering of Cinema4D, Maya and Blender projects for several years and now we are ready to expand our supported software list by offering Houdini render farm services to studios and industry professionals.

About Houdini

Developed by SideFX, Houdini software is a 3D powerhouse for modelling, animating, simulating, and rendering. It is a must-have on the skill set list for anyone who wishes to work in the VFX and film industries. Despite being widely used, it has a reputation of being one of the toughest programs to learn: most of its logic is based on nodes, which require a technical mindset to engage with, and many operations are done through tackling arrays of raw values. 

Each action completed in Houdini is remembered as a node in an expansive tree. This way, at any point in time, such a node can be accessed and adjusted; this leads to the changes down the line without needing to recreate all the actions from scratch. Complex trees can be copied and applied to different objects or in different orders, leading to new results. The nodes can output attributes and parameters that can be extracted in a different part of the node tree and used for a different object or frame. The same node structure is used for materials and animations.  

It may seem complicated when creating geometry and characters, however, where Houdini truly shines is in physical simulations and particle systems creation. The Special FX edition provides the best tools for creating realistic flame and smoke, simulating liquids, fabric deformations, crowds, and object destruction. This greatly improves the workflow for creating special effects for movies and video games, as well as being considered one of the reasons for the recent evolution of visuals in the industry.

Remote rendering

Houdini’s capabilities are equally useful when applied to animation, which takes a long time to visualize on your computer. The built-in render engine, Mantra, provides highly realistic images, however, the drawback is how demanding it can be on hardware. Particle systems and complex lighting scenarios (e.g., the ones present in explosions) require a large amount of samples and the more samples are needed, the more time is required to process them. Therefore, rendering in a cloud becomes necessary to offset these time constraints. 

At Megarender, we use not just any machines but AMD Threadripper 3990X servers, the most powerful CPUs currently available on the market. Each processor consists of 64 cores and can run 128 threads simultaneously. This way we can guarantee fast-speed rendering of complex scenes and high-resolution frames. If you need a different render-engine, like RenderMan, Arnold, V-Ray, mental ray, or Maxwell, we will install it to accommodate your project.