Octane for Houdini

The OctaneRender® for Houdini® plugin can render large amounts of particles using the native Octane Sphere Primitive.

Figure 1: Houdini particles rendered with OctaneRender 

The plugin can use any kind of object primitive as a particle's source, rendering the points as Octane spheres. You can enable the particle feature in the Octane +ObjParms by selecting Particles as the Octane Object Type (figure 2). In this tab, you can also set the default radius for the particles without the need for a Pscale attribute. The particles support the P, Pscale, UV, and V point attributes. If the V attribute is available, OctaneRender can render the particles with motion blur if this feature is enabled in the ROP node.

Figure 2: Particle parameters found in the Particles tab 

The particles feature has an option to pack the particle UV map, which is the information needed to map a color (usually Cd) and alpha attributes across the particles.