Side Effects Software’s Senior Mathematician, Jeff Lait has an in-depth look into creating distributed simulations in Houdini. Distributing solvers is not a new thing to Houdini. Houdini 10 introduced support for distributed solvers.
Distributed simulations allow the computation of effects that cannot be represented on a single machine.
Distributed simulations allow the number crunching on a sim to be shared by multiple machines, making it much faster to compute large scale effects.
This Distributed Simulation Mastercass offers a firm understanding for the potential of distributed simulations and how it can help out on a production.
Jeff gives an overview of the current state of these solvers. This includes Houdini 15’s new support for resizing smoke simulations and water tanks. Jeff demonstrates how to set up a few distributed effects, covering some of Houdini’s shelf tools and HQueue. There is also more detail and technicality as Jeff goes through building a new distributed setup via micro solvers and manually invokes the tracker.
