HdCycles
Using Blender’s Cycles rendering engine as a viewport renderer in Houdini? Is this realistic or highly utopian? The former! Because with Tangent Animation’s hdCycles plugin, this can be realised.
Now let’s get down to brass tacks: How does embedding hdCycles into the pipeline work? Once hdCycles is integrated, you create 3D assets in Blender, assemble them into a scene in Houdini, export them back to Blender – and render them there. Does that sound confusing, or just like a nice pipeline? We think the latter.
Enough of the blather? You want facts? Facts like the fact that Tangent Animation used hdCycles in the Annie Award-nominated animated film Next Gen (German film title: Das Mädchen und ihr Roboter – Die nächste Generation)? Another fact: There are plans to use Cycles as a viewport renderer in Solaris.
Too positive, right? Where are hdCycles’ shortcomings? Well, key functions such as volumes, advanced motion blur, tile rendering and the Cryptomatte ID matte generation system are currently missing. But you’re supposed to own up to your shortcomings, right? And Tangent describes adding the missing features as a priority.
Availability & further information
More information about hdCycles can be found on Tangent Animation’s GitHub. The plugin also wants to be downloaded for Houdini there. But please click on the video first. For the sake of clarity, and so on.
