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