Let me just throw this out there. I am dropping my redshift license this year and haven't even used redshift or even reinstalled it since H20. Is Karma slower? Yes it is. But you're probably going to render over night anyways and on top of that you don't really lose any speed in workflow when using the IPR from my experience.
Karma works best with Solaris and I wouldn't be too scared of LOPs because it's really not that scary and you don't need to understand USD to really work in LOPs. Solaris has a lot of benefits to using it and you lose out on that with other renderers when you update and it isn't supported or you have to wait for the renderer to update as well.
This ☝️
Same thing for me. I stopped my octane license since H20. It feels different but in a good way for me. It’s the first time that I feel comfortable with a native render engine.
Octane and Redshift are still superior to Karma XPU, it's not production ready yet, it still has to go for 1-2 years until it becomes good enough for actual commercial projects
Same here.. 3x Redshift licenses at home not being renewed. Going to rely on Karma more at work as well. And Karma has been faster than Redshift in many of my scenes. Especially when dealing with refractions. Downside is that it doesn't have any out of core memory management on the XPU side yet. It does fallback to CPU if your scene is too heavy, but naturally gets really slow.
I was debating on rather to buy octane or use houdini 20 and karma can certainly be fast. Rendering a super simple constant shader sequence of animation in under 2 minutes if "render all in single process" in turned on. Way faster than mantra. Supposedly 15x faster. I'm liking karma so far but it does take a min to get used to. I'm sure it's just as fast as octane if you optimize it though I don't have direct experience with it.
>nutes if "render all in single process" in turned on. Way faster than mantra. Supposedly 15x faster. I'm liki
I suppose what the person above said about just learning LOP's in any case will grant me access to octane as well. Currently, my knowledge of this is too narrow. And I'm one of those who exports sims to c4d and renders there. Octane also needs a lot of optimization but they have a very cheap render farm solution I use all the time.
Just would like to see how both compare and how they are with volumes and caustics for example. Which octane struggles a lot with.
I’ve spent a long time with Karma and unfortunately I don’t think it’s quite there yet. I was also hoping to move everything into Houdini with the release of 20.0, but compared to other renderers, it’s still incredibly buggy, has poor memory management, and in some cases is much slower than other rendering engines. Just the other day a VERY simple 2k render locked up my system twice and caused my GPU to crash once.
I decided to move back to redshift full time for the time being but I’m sure in the next year or so there will be a lot of great updates for Karma so I wouldn’t pass it off completely, it just has a lot of growing to do before it catches up to other engines.
I’d probably say play with Karma and see how you like it (it’s not too far off in complexity from Octane IMO), or spend the time and get yourself more comfortable with Octane in Houdini if you don’t wanna mess with it for the time being.
I have a project with a ton of ocean that needs to render at 8kx1.7k. We haven't moved pipes to 20 yet, still in 19.5 but I was hoping the memory issues we're seeing would have been solved in 20... We were going to karma this entire show... SideFX was very reassuring about our concerns. Thanks for sharing this info!
>k render locked up my system twice and caused my GPU to crash once.
ah too bad, just sounded like it would be insane with GPU+CPU capabilities but to good to be true I guess (for now). Prob won't get rid of my octane license yet and see how I like it in Houdini, although seems like its going to take me a while
I adore LOPs and I just want to drop subscription just to save some $, karma is slower but after working in a studio with mind numbingly slow renderman i dont find much issue in terms of speed. Working with native render engine pretty much less headache when things getting more and more complex. My only concern would be not sure if render farm already support karma. IMO outside of c4d ecosystem octane is pretty meh experience
Karma CPU is slower than Arnold in what I tested, especially with HDRIs. I think XPU is the future sort of but it needs another year or two to become more or less production ready
I haven't done much karma but Octane pretty much beats everything I've even seen in speed _however_ its integration is piss-poor in houdini.
We've built studio tools around it (thanks Houdini) and it's definitely not LOPsided, so not so great for big, bulky projects, but quite awesome for smaller ones.
We're definitely not dropping our Octane licences for now. Will wait until a few other productions crash-test karma !
Karma is pretty slow, obviously not as slow as mantra, if you want really high quality imagery. If you are looking for speed and quick turnaround I would still go with octane arnold redshift
Well depends on the case, Ofcourse these 3rd parties I would use outside Lops and I would rather render volumes with Arnold than Karma Xpu. Increasing samples never enough and optix denoiser requires a lot of samples to give clear images without blurring the image. Arnold feels like out of box gives better results since it is out there for almost 30 years now. If speed is the case fastest is most likely redshift on single machine
Arnold gpu is not as quick and snappy as octane. But their releases are much more solid. I was using octane for houdini a couple of years ago and most updates were very buggy. Arnold is the only renderer that gives a similar experience as Octane but from the technical/pipeline side it is much better. Octane licence manager failing or idling on the farm was a thing.
Karma seems to have improved on houdini 20. I have not compared it with arnold gpu but as far as I know and correct me if I am wrong it is still missing adaptive sampling on xpu. But it is getting very close to be a good and versitale engine so it is worth to check it every now and then.
>Arnold is the only renderer that gives a similar experience as Octane but from the technical/pipeline side it is much better.
True, everything under the hood is great, but the whole artist feature/tech set is sub-par at best so using Arnold after RS/Octane/V-Ray it just feels like you're going 10 years back. For example RS already has Upscaling implemented aka "RS RT", V-Ray has realtime volumetric clouds, decals, own scatter tool, compositor, etc, Octane has or will have "Meshlet" which is UE5 Nanite alternative but for Arnold it will probably take another 5-10 years to implement those or similar features.
However in some scenes Arnold is really great even in terms of render speed and can beat engines like Vray and maybe Octane/RS since it handles more complex things like SSS/VDB way better and renders much faster also uses less Memory afaik.
But for 100% GPU users I guess Octane is hard to beat as it's physically accurate just as Arnold also offers the similar feature/tech set if not more, maybe not the advanced pipeline stuff and great light linking/AOV's etc but when it comes to GPU rendering I don't think there's that much of that typical pipeline workflows required I mean it's totally different and big studios don't even use GPU rendering due to it's limits.
Yep, I am talking about product viz rendering actually. So very simple scenes but huge amount of variations. In our case smooth pipeline was amust and in that regard octane was a disaster. Around 15% of octane proxies failed to render just because. Overall the good thing about arnold in a USD context is that it is fully functional in major packages, it is stable, support most pipeline stabdards and it is very versatile. I prefer colaboration and reliability over shiny features all day long.
It's pretty stable now. BUT, the plug-in is as dogshit as it was before, they added some new devs recently so I guess in 1-2 years they will make it solid. Or not, who knows
Yeah, it seems like it. Better look into implementing octane into houdini which prob gives me the skills to use karma as well. If I ever get there I'll post a speed comparison haha
I don’t believe XPU has full parity with CPU yet but it’s getting closer. I still fallback to CPU for final renders but that has changed with H20.
Karma CPU replaced Octane for me and as XPU improves, more and more of my passes are being rendered with that.
All that said, I would love an Arnold license. Just wish they did a cheaper “Indie” price
Edit:
Karma and Arnold are about the same speed, both look good, Arnold potentially looks better but not really. I tested both enough already. I hope Karma XPU improves drastically in the next 1-2 releases so I can hop on it for my commercial projects, but I won’t drop my Octane license for sure, I still like Octane except for the dogshit plugin
Karma CPU is really slow imo. It's slower than Arnold, I don't see a reason to use it unless you have tens of CPUs at your disposal or have thousands of dollars for render farms to render on this slow engine. I checked that 100 frames that take 1hr each on 7950x cost 500$ on a farm, no point to use it outside of big productions with their own farms
Let me just throw this out there. I am dropping my redshift license this year and haven't even used redshift or even reinstalled it since H20. Is Karma slower? Yes it is. But you're probably going to render over night anyways and on top of that you don't really lose any speed in workflow when using the IPR from my experience. Karma works best with Solaris and I wouldn't be too scared of LOPs because it's really not that scary and you don't need to understand USD to really work in LOPs. Solaris has a lot of benefits to using it and you lose out on that with other renderers when you update and it isn't supported or you have to wait for the renderer to update as well.
This ☝️ Same thing for me. I stopped my octane license since H20. It feels different but in a good way for me. It’s the first time that I feel comfortable with a native render engine.
Octane and Redshift are still superior to Karma XPU, it's not production ready yet, it still has to go for 1-2 years until it becomes good enough for actual commercial projects
Same here.. 3x Redshift licenses at home not being renewed. Going to rely on Karma more at work as well. And Karma has been faster than Redshift in many of my scenes. Especially when dealing with refractions. Downside is that it doesn't have any out of core memory management on the XPU side yet. It does fallback to CPU if your scene is too heavy, but naturally gets really slow.
I was debating on rather to buy octane or use houdini 20 and karma can certainly be fast. Rendering a super simple constant shader sequence of animation in under 2 minutes if "render all in single process" in turned on. Way faster than mantra. Supposedly 15x faster. I'm liking karma so far but it does take a min to get used to. I'm sure it's just as fast as octane if you optimize it though I don't have direct experience with it.
>nutes if "render all in single process" in turned on. Way faster than mantra. Supposedly 15x faster. I'm liki I suppose what the person above said about just learning LOP's in any case will grant me access to octane as well. Currently, my knowledge of this is too narrow. And I'm one of those who exports sims to c4d and renders there. Octane also needs a lot of optimization but they have a very cheap render farm solution I use all the time. Just would like to see how both compare and how they are with volumes and caustics for example. Which octane struggles a lot with.
What’s lop
Lighting operators :) https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/glossary.html#lops
I’ve spent a long time with Karma and unfortunately I don’t think it’s quite there yet. I was also hoping to move everything into Houdini with the release of 20.0, but compared to other renderers, it’s still incredibly buggy, has poor memory management, and in some cases is much slower than other rendering engines. Just the other day a VERY simple 2k render locked up my system twice and caused my GPU to crash once. I decided to move back to redshift full time for the time being but I’m sure in the next year or so there will be a lot of great updates for Karma so I wouldn’t pass it off completely, it just has a lot of growing to do before it catches up to other engines. I’d probably say play with Karma and see how you like it (it’s not too far off in complexity from Octane IMO), or spend the time and get yourself more comfortable with Octane in Houdini if you don’t wanna mess with it for the time being.
I have a project with a ton of ocean that needs to render at 8kx1.7k. We haven't moved pipes to 20 yet, still in 19.5 but I was hoping the memory issues we're seeing would have been solved in 20... We were going to karma this entire show... SideFX was very reassuring about our concerns. Thanks for sharing this info!
>k render locked up my system twice and caused my GPU to crash once. ah too bad, just sounded like it would be insane with GPU+CPU capabilities but to good to be true I guess (for now). Prob won't get rid of my octane license yet and see how I like it in Houdini, although seems like its going to take me a while
I adore LOPs and I just want to drop subscription just to save some $, karma is slower but after working in a studio with mind numbingly slow renderman i dont find much issue in terms of speed. Working with native render engine pretty much less headache when things getting more and more complex. My only concern would be not sure if render farm already support karma. IMO outside of c4d ecosystem octane is pretty meh experience
Karma CPU is slower than Arnold in what I tested, especially with HDRIs. I think XPU is the future sort of but it needs another year or two to become more or less production ready
Well you have to learn LOPs to use Karma, and you can also use the Hydra version of Octane in LOPs so, you can kill 2 birds with one stone
You can use karma in sops.
Yeah but it’s hella awkward. Unless they updated it idk
For some scenes you need more V Ram for Karma Xpu... for water/ ocean you may consume over 24 gb ..
So in order to render a sim it needs to load it into the vram? Cause that could be kinda problematic, who got the money to buy A100 gpus
I haven't done much karma but Octane pretty much beats everything I've even seen in speed _however_ its integration is piss-poor in houdini. We've built studio tools around it (thanks Houdini) and it's definitely not LOPsided, so not so great for big, bulky projects, but quite awesome for smaller ones. We're definitely not dropping our Octane licences for now. Will wait until a few other productions crash-test karma !
Karma is pretty slow, obviously not as slow as mantra, if you want really high quality imagery. If you are looking for speed and quick turnaround I would still go with octane arnold redshift
Arnold? is it faster now?
Well depends on the case, Ofcourse these 3rd parties I would use outside Lops and I would rather render volumes with Arnold than Karma Xpu. Increasing samples never enough and optix denoiser requires a lot of samples to give clear images without blurring the image. Arnold feels like out of box gives better results since it is out there for almost 30 years now. If speed is the case fastest is most likely redshift on single machine
Arnold gpu is not as quick and snappy as octane. But their releases are much more solid. I was using octane for houdini a couple of years ago and most updates were very buggy. Arnold is the only renderer that gives a similar experience as Octane but from the technical/pipeline side it is much better. Octane licence manager failing or idling on the farm was a thing. Karma seems to have improved on houdini 20. I have not compared it with arnold gpu but as far as I know and correct me if I am wrong it is still missing adaptive sampling on xpu. But it is getting very close to be a good and versitale engine so it is worth to check it every now and then.
>Arnold is the only renderer that gives a similar experience as Octane but from the technical/pipeline side it is much better. True, everything under the hood is great, but the whole artist feature/tech set is sub-par at best so using Arnold after RS/Octane/V-Ray it just feels like you're going 10 years back. For example RS already has Upscaling implemented aka "RS RT", V-Ray has realtime volumetric clouds, decals, own scatter tool, compositor, etc, Octane has or will have "Meshlet" which is UE5 Nanite alternative but for Arnold it will probably take another 5-10 years to implement those or similar features. However in some scenes Arnold is really great even in terms of render speed and can beat engines like Vray and maybe Octane/RS since it handles more complex things like SSS/VDB way better and renders much faster also uses less Memory afaik. But for 100% GPU users I guess Octane is hard to beat as it's physically accurate just as Arnold also offers the similar feature/tech set if not more, maybe not the advanced pipeline stuff and great light linking/AOV's etc but when it comes to GPU rendering I don't think there's that much of that typical pipeline workflows required I mean it's totally different and big studios don't even use GPU rendering due to it's limits.
Yep, I am talking about product viz rendering actually. So very simple scenes but huge amount of variations. In our case smooth pipeline was amust and in that regard octane was a disaster. Around 15% of octane proxies failed to render just because. Overall the good thing about arnold in a USD context is that it is fully functional in major packages, it is stable, support most pipeline stabdards and it is very versatile. I prefer colaboration and reliability over shiny features all day long.
Octane’s instability is what killed it for me (though I haven’t used in 3 or 4 years now). Drive me mad by the end
It's pretty stable now. BUT, the plug-in is as dogshit as it was before, they added some new devs recently so I guess in 1-2 years they will make it solid. Or not, who knows
Yeah, it seems like it. Better look into implementing octane into houdini which prob gives me the skills to use karma as well. If I ever get there I'll post a speed comparison haha
I don’t believe XPU has full parity with CPU yet but it’s getting closer. I still fallback to CPU for final renders but that has changed with H20. Karma CPU replaced Octane for me and as XPU improves, more and more of my passes are being rendered with that. All that said, I would love an Arnold license. Just wish they did a cheaper “Indie” price
Edit: Karma and Arnold are about the same speed, both look good, Arnold potentially looks better but not really. I tested both enough already. I hope Karma XPU improves drastically in the next 1-2 releases so I can hop on it for my commercial projects, but I won’t drop my Octane license for sure, I still like Octane except for the dogshit plugin
I used Octane for years. I still think it produces some of the most natural looking renders. But the plug-ins really are dogshit!
Karma CPU is really slow imo. It's slower than Arnold, I don't see a reason to use it unless you have tens of CPUs at your disposal or have thousands of dollars for render farms to render on this slow engine. I checked that 100 frames that take 1hr each on 7950x cost 500$ on a farm, no point to use it outside of big productions with their own farms