Houdini releases HQueue: Cloud Computing for Artists

Houdini has just announced a new product offering called “HQueue”, an artist friendly cloud computing toolkit.  Using it, artists can offload costly rendering or computation processes to local clusters and Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud right inside Houdini.

Mantra includes micropolygon, raytraced or physically-based rendering as well as depth of field, fast motion blur, high dynamic range image support, deep raster files and high quality displacement mapping. Renderings can be distributed on up to 20 machines while simulations can be set up on a single machine. Distributed fluid simulations are planned for a future release of the cloud computing tools.

Costs on the EC2 cloud are reasonable, a mere $1.99 per machine/hour for a 64-bit machine with 7.5GB of ram, and a mere 50 cents for 32-bit machines with 1.7G of ram.

via Cloud Computing for Artists – Side Effects Software Inc..

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a visualization scientist working for a federal research lab, aiding researchers to discover the insights buried within their terabyte datasets generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. He also runs VizWorld.com .