Better Lookdev in Solaris with Live Render (Patreon)

When Houdini 21 was released one of the new features I was looking forward to the most was Live Render. It might seem funny given how many improvements there were to choose from, but it’s true. I’d even go so far as to say that Live Render is one of my favorite Houdini features of all time.

What is it exactly?

Live Render is a new node in Solaris that brings its rendering workflow much closer to the smooth, polished ones we’ve come to expect from Arnold, V-Ray or Gaffer, among others.

One of the problems with Solaris before now was that lookdev in the context of final frame rendering was clunky and archaic. There was a token “Image viewport” accessible in the Set View menu, but it was easy to break and didn’t even support proper render regions. You could set up lights and adjust materials in 3D view just fine, but if you wanted to switch over to refining your final frames the experience quickly became frustrating.

Well, that’s now a thing of the past. Live Render is Houdini’s version of the IPR/Frame Buffer concept from, for example, Arnold or V-Ray. This workflow lets you keep a 2D render running and responding to all scene modifications, isolate portions of the image as needed, then save your work to a catalog for easy comparison and export.

For those who have been following along with The Complete Houdini you might be bracing yourselves for a classic, over-engineered Houdini-style solution, but fear not! This is one of the easiest to use tools in Houdini and practically runs itself. You can just relax and focus on creating nice images.

How easy is it? If you’ve got a full Solaris scene already set up simply attach a Live Render node to the end of the tree. Select your renderer (Render Delegate) and existing Render Settings (motion blur, depth of field, sampling, etc.). And… that’s it!

Open a Render Gallery tab and click Start Render. Your image will start rendering and will respond to any changes you make in the scene.

Modify your lights, update textures, add color correction, AOVs, you name it. It’s all live.

Isolate a render region using Shift-Left Click-Drag to focus on specific sections of the image.

Click Snapshot View to save your work to the gallery for later review and comparison.

Set up A and B images to wipe between or composite over each other.

All your gallery images are saved to disk, letting you pick up again where you left off.

This is all really nice and it’s a great quality of life upgrade for Solaris users. Highly recommended!