HOUDINI: SOLARIS and KARMA RENDERER ("FIRST STEPS")
"Solaris is a suite of look development, layout and lighting tools that empower artists to create USD-based scene graphs that go from asset creation to final render." As Solaris is being used more and more in production, the time has come to learn to use it and also in the meantime, try SideFX new renderer Karma.
I created this mini bathroom scene for that purpose. Everything was modeled in Houdini from scratch. After many hours of testing and watching countless tutorials, I have come to enjoy Solaris and its workflow. It seems to me that lighting and shading are achieved more quickly than in the old way. Karma also gave me good results pretty much straight away. I really like XPU for its speed. Anyway, I am still just scratching the surface of these very powerful tools and I need to dig in deeper but already the results are very promising.
The animation below was rendered with XPU in HD (1920x1080), with DOF and motion blur on. Settings are: Path Traced samples 256 / Light sampling quality 4 / Limits: Diffuse 8, Reflection 6, Refraction 6 / Dicing 2 / Pixel Oracle Variance, Min samples 128
Avg rendertime per frame was 13 minutes on my workstation: AMD Rysen 3970X 32cores, Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080, RAM 128 GB
Denoising was done in Copernicus with Albedo and Normals AOV's. There is a little flickering in some areas (cloth and soap holder) so a few more samples could have cleaned it, but overall the result is quite good.
Below: Still shots and Packshot. The lighting tool combined with the light linker is a little buggy sometimes, but overall super useful.
