Clarisse FX died , now what's best for lookdev of densely populated backgrounds, big scenes ?

gnoop

For sort of  background LODs where evrything baked in together .   With trees , grass covered  crumbled cityscapes ,   rendered clouds . 

Through last 20 years I  used Vue,  then Terragen, then  ClarisseFX  , then just Blender with Octane .

The first two were non stop pain in your..... Clarisse was perfect  with lots of procedural  tools . Best scatter tools I ever experienced  . Nice immediate preview . Pretty adequate  vs  VUE and Terragen  where you got nothing  especially  close  to what you saw in preview render.    Clarisse is only soft I know that could import a huge  900mil  poly alembic  from reality capture and bake proper textures from it. All at once.    Well, before they got their own baker. 

  Only one huge drawback .  It took ages for a final render.

So once Octane started to take less time for first pixels on screen and got  its  awfully, terribly inconvenient  scatter on surface  but  as a huge plus providing  instant  visual feadback for your tweaks in the render  I have gradually  moved on from Clarisse.   My guess everyone did the same  and thus she died. 

     

  Still it's not even close to Clarisse conveniences in tools . Texture baker  is way behind Clarisse  and so on and on.

So I wonder  what's other alternatives?   

poopipe

short answer  : learn houdini 

gnoop

poopipe said:

short answer  : learn houdini 

You mean with Octane  or Redshift ?    I actually did tried to learn it 10 years ago . Simple things took 100x time  vs even 3d max.        Blender nodes now looks so much more logically intuitive for me and what's a big plus totally optional.    But I haven't even tried  Houdini  since.

poopipe

the UI is a bit better now and there's a load more instant gratification buttons available - its a lot less of a pain in the arse to operate than it used to be.  

it is still houdini underneath though so you have to be prepared to stab yourself in the eyeballs if you want to do anything complicated

I just remembered katana exists. might be worth a look

gnoop

Thanks poopipe. 

That Katana web page couldn't even explain what it is exactly .   Sounds like some niche thing for something  very specific  in  complicated  VFX pipeline.         

 While in fact I just need an interactive  landscape  modeller with good scattering tools  and  more or less instant visual feedback.  Preferably working with Octane  since Octane is much more less pain in someone  a..  to setup light and materials than Red shift in my humble opinion.     At least from my  former experience of a few years back.     Blender would  do just  well if not  that slow response  geometry nodes  have  into Octane.    Octane native  scatterer shader  responds almost instantly for comparison  but limited to only 4 things to scatter  and you have to do complex mess to workaround it and I sometimes couldn't figure out a thing in my own old files  because of that. 

So I wonder does anyone  have an experience  with Octane in  Houdini?  

kanga

https://www.g2.com/products/clarisse-ifx/competitors/alternatives

https://alternativeto.net/software/isotropix-clarisse-ifx/

https://sourceforge.net/software/product/Clarisse-iFX/alternatives

oglu

I would say everything that does use USD. Cause USD data is really fast to load.