Rendering
Houdini is bundled with a production-class renderer, Mantra, which has many similarities to PhotoRealistic RenderMan in its scope and application. Micropolygon rendering is supported, allowing high-quality displacement operations as well as traditional scan-line and raytracing modes. Shaders are scriptable and composed in their VEX language, or by using VOPs; their node-based interface to programming VEX. Mantra (as does Houdini itself) also supports point-clouds, which can be similar in application as brickmaps in Renderman. This allows more complicated light interactions, such as sub-surface scattering and ambient occlusion, to be produced with lower computational overhead. Mantra can perform extremely fast volume rendering, and also Physically Based Rendering - a technique which attempts to more accurately model the interactions of light.
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