Rendering Plugin Deals With Thousands of Area Lights in Houdini & Maya

A tool called hdRstr by Stefan Krake provides impressive results in real-time. 

Developer Stefan Krake shared a look hdRstr, a plugin that is said to be capable of dealing with tens of thousands of area lights in real-time in the viewport of Maya or Houdini. The tool uses RTXDI, Nvidia’s new direct illumination system for GPU ray tracing, and it is now available in free open beta.
The core of the new tool is Nvidia’s implementation of its ReSTIR sampling algorithm allowing the plugin to deal with the direct illumination in a scene. The main strength of the tool is the ability to provide a high-speed preview when editing a lighting setup. It is said to offer a "good approximation" of the final direct lighting in a scene.

The tool is developed as a Hydra render delegate supporting the main features of Pixar’s Universal Scene Description (USD). In Houdini, hdRstr can be used as part of a USD workflow (Hydra render delegates are only supported inside Solaris). As for Maya, it can be used as an alternative to Viewport 2.0. Please note that it currently only works on Windows.

The tool is available as a free open beta for Houdini 18.5 and Maya 2022+ on Windows 10 only. Learn more here. Don't forget to join our new Reddit pageour new Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we are sharing breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.

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