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Houdini with 8gb of memory?
- Thread starter nixiejames
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Looks like the requirements are such that its technically possible
It appears that the publisher states that the ARM processor is not supported, that may be the bigger nut to crack then the ram, but its not an application that I'm knowledgeable with. Others may have better advise then what I can offer.
You will get performance hits unless you do basic jobs in Houdini.
But you may want to get the non commercial license (unless u own the full or indie version) and experiment.
Been using Houdini on my MBA for a while (M1 8GB 7 Core). It works well enough for noodling things out on the go (trying out kinefx, prototyping effects, that kinda thing). So it does run and there's no major compatibility issues (viewports all work fine, things will simulate); the Apple Silicon build of Houdini has been rock solid. That said....
As Singhs.apps mentioned give the non commercial version a whirl and see how it goes for what you want to do.
- Simulation wise you're not going get very far on 8GB; you can do rudimentary sims but really you want 16/32gb for anything mid res.
- Rendering (Karma / Mantra) is, unsurprisingly, super slow. Also with 8 gb you're not going to be able to render anything complex. Like watching paint dry.
- SOP related stuff all works well enough. If you're interested in procedural modelling / rigging / crowds it's kinda usable.
As Singhs.apps mentioned give the non commercial version a whirl and see how it goes for what you want to do.
This was very helpful thanks. I have a new Macbook Pro M2 8GB but I have a chance to trade it off with a Lenovo Legion 5i. It has 16GB of ddr4 ram, an rtx 3060, and an i7 11800h. I used to do simple vfx compositing stuff on Fusion and now I want to do more and delve with Houdini. I'm interested in its sims involving destruction, pyro, liquid, and most excitingly for me, its particles system. Do you think it's a good deal, or nay?
You can surely do some basic sim on both but neither machine are ideal for what you need. Windows is not as good as MacOS for memory management so I won’t be surprised to see both machine having similar limits in this regard. The best advice is always to judge by yourself, download the demo and test the software on both systems.
The problem is I have to trade one to get the other one xD I can't know if the Lenovo one is better or not unless I lose the one I have now.
What Sirio said.
you may not necessarily be getting a better laptop for Houdini in exchange for the one you have. At some point you will run into a performance wall in both cases, esp as you go up the ladder in scene/project complexity.
Also it appears that you are just starting out in Houdini which may mean that it will take you some time to be proficient at it. We don’t know if you have experience with 3D application.
you may want to install the non-commercial Houdini in your current MacBook Pro and check out its performance or if Houdini is something you may even want to work with.
I have with Blender and Fusion. But mostly just basic 3D modelling and compositing. I'm not really fond of its particles system but I heard it's getting revamped so that's something to look forward to. The thing is, I spent months learning After Effects, Blender, and Davinci/Fusion. I don't just pick a favorite, and then leave the other ones because I always find one software to better at certain things. But like I said, even if I find this one to be OK for starting to learn Houdini, I'd have to lose it first before testing the other one so it's a bit of a dilemma for me which is why I'm asking for advice on which one to get.
Agreed with Sirio76; worth putting Houdini through its paces to see how it suits you.
Similarly, there's probably not that much between the two laptops; both with be powerful enough for you to learn the fundamentals of the software and decide if it's something you want to invest time and money in.
Nope; as far as I can tell it uses OpenCL and OpenGL. System properties lists the OpenGL Renderer as Open GL 4.1 - Apple Metal
Funnily enough the GL is more stable than on my iMac Pro and some things oddly faster (grain sprite rendering for example). Still misses out on some features due to being limited to 4.1 rather that the 4.5 of Windows and Linux.
If Houdini doesn't have a Metal backend, would the Lenovo be better? That computer will take advantage of more features (e.g. GPU-accelerated Karma) than the MBA.
Yes it will run with 8gb o memory 😍 -> https://www.cruxis.com/chess/houdini.htm
You’re right on the karma xPU front. Not sure how much power you’d get from a 3060, but could be worth it.
Outside of that most of the differences are pretty minor feature wise. I think the main differences would be:
- no AO on viewport volumes
- lower quality lighting for viewport volumes
- vellum match constrains / pressure constraints will be super slow (fast pathway Nvidia only)
Tbh the only one that’s an issue is the vellum constrains.
There are also a couple of bits of weirdness which I’m not sure is down to AS or my laptop being on Ventura. Either was relatively sure sidefx will fix them in the near future.
Is 8GB practical to do short youtube skits like these ones:
youtube.com/watch?v=DNihIM3q4N0
youtube.com/watch?v=coC5I3Iyopo
youtube.com/watch?v=M-NxpoLejdE
or will these burn my laptop? xD
Short answer, really wouldn't recommend it.
Longer answer: decided to actually give it a go rather than make something up. So was doing something like this (since it was not a million miles off the sword):
The basic low res setup was fine to work with; sim time was a few minutes, displayed fine in the viewport. Everything was ok. Can iterate pretty quickly. Happy days.
Increased the resolution to a level that would give something closer to a final result and things did not go well. The sim time increased to 20min. The laptop it didn't get too hot to touch but pretty sure the throttling added 3-4 minutes to the time.
The viewport interactivity also took a nosedive - 8GB was nowhere near enough memory to display the volume in a reasonable manner in the viewport. Making changes was fine, but the display was really slow and often beach balling.
So from and FX point of view, pretty much fell in line with what I said before:
- Works well enough for prototyping.
- For procedural modelling / rigging / crowds / light particle stuff it's usable.
- For FX you really need more memory (16Gb min, 32+ recommended), particularly for FLIP or Pyro.
- Similarly feel that you'd want at least 24 core GPU.
- Rendering is going to be tricky.
I see... Guess it's not the time to delve into FX. I'll stick to modeling in Blender for now. But man oh man, the things you can do in Houdini are something else. So at least 32gb of memory, and 24 GPU cores. One of these days man...
Reading it over, my reply really wasn't sufficiently nuanced (and possibly chose a really unsuited effect for testing).
It's probably worth grabbing the free apprentice version of Houdini and giving it a shot; the air is definitely fast enough for learning most of the software (or certainly deciding if you want to invest more time in it). The actual software will run fine.
Similarly lot of the things are going to be perfectly usable; particle systems, rigid bodies and modelling will all be fast enough to get a feel for and develop some nice effects. Houdini's also pretty flexible; you can easily work on lower res versions of the effects then scale it once you've narrowed the look you're after, or split up your effect into separate elements and caches to maintain speed.
The main areas where you're going to run into limitations are high res pyro simulations and fluid simulations. That doesn't mean that you can't learn those areas, it's just you'll want to keep them relatively low res.
I'm still going to maintain that you want a bit more memory, but if you're not going for high res explosions or fluid sims you can probably get pretty far on the MBA.
Is it possible to export my Houdini Apprentice project to a file that's readable on Blender? Maybe I can bump up the res on Blender to see if it magically performs better? I remember doing something similar before when I tried using Maya and Fusion. I think I export it to alembic cache then I import that to Fusion for compositing. I don't remember being able to increase the res though.
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