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.

Houdini comes with Solaris – a special suite of tools and a work environment for the USD workflow. USD stands for Universal Scene Descriptor, a software platform developed by Pixar for use in complex production pipelines. It allows the transfer of scenes between different computers, applications or rendering engines without corruption. Solaris enables Houdini to take USD scenes and render them in Karma XPU, Arnold or any other third-party rendering plugin. Megarender may be the right place to render your USD project.

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. 

Another native rendering engine for Houdini is Karma, a true powerhouse among physically-based renderers. It comes in two variants: CPU and XPU. Karma CPU supports all the legacy features of Houdini’s materials and effects, providing stable results across versions. Karma XPU uses both CPU and GPU to render, maximizing the use of rendering nodes. For these tasks, we provide a fleet of NVidia RTX 3090 GPUs, which are reliable and offer a great balance of processing power and VRAM. For more VRAM-demanding projects, we also offer RTX 4090 and RTX 5090 GPUs upon request. 

Arnold is another rendering engine that works well with Houdini. It is developed by Autodesk and comes as a separate plugin. Arnold supports the full Houdini Solaris + USD pipeline and can render using either CPU or GPU. It is a powerful tool for large-scale projects, and is especially useful for groups whose members also use Maya, 3DS MAX, and Cinema 4D.

At Megarender, we will install any version of Houdini and Mantra, Karma XPU or Arnold that you require.