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

gnoop · Jul 2023

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 · Jul 2023

short answer : learn houdini

gnoop · Jul 2023

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 · Jul 2023

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 · Jul 2023

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 · Aug 2023

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 · Aug 2023

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

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

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