![]() Houdini is my primary content creation application when it comes to 3D. The image of the bar scene in this article was rendered using Octane running on an M1 Mac. Notably, at this time, Apple's hardware doesn't offer the same raw power that you get from the latest generation RTX card, but it is more than good enough for producing static renders and simple animations. Redshift arguably has a slightly nicer user interface and provides better integration with the Solaris toolset compared to Octane, but each enables rendering options that utilise the full power of Mac GPUs within Houdini. Both have supported M1 and M2 chips natively for some time and both work well with Houdini for macOS. I have been testing two third-party GPU renderers, Octane and Redshift. Admittedly, the delay here mainly falls on the shoulders of Epic Games who have been slow out of the box with Apple Silicon support. Support for Houdini Engine within Unreal is also still a work-in-progress, even though native support for Unity was added late last year. This has not yet been rewritten to support Metal (Apple's hardware-accelerated graphics framework), so currently can only utilise the CPU for rendering which leaves it lagging in performance compared to third-party alternatives. There are of course things that can still be improved, the major one being SideFX's forward-looking hybrid renderer, Karma XPU. Simulations, including the wonderful Vellum system, run incredibly fast, viewport navigation is smooth and even many external plugins work as expected. Houdini 19.5 running on M1 is a solid release. I have been testing the beta during the past twelve months and development has continuously exceeded my expectations. This launch means the premier 3D VFX application is finally optimised to run natively on the latest generation of power efficient Mac computers. The brand new, fully supported build for Apple's M1 and M2 chips comes after a public year-long beta period that saw regular improvements to the technology preview. The team at SideFX today launched Houdini for Apple Silicon. ![]() Bar Scene from the ASWF Digital Production Example Library.
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