For this project, I focused my learning on Ocean Spectra, Vellum, and POP. The learning curve is not as steep as it looks. I encourage students and newcomers to not be afraid of Houdini and to choose a few elements to learn per project, taking it one step at a time, in the long run, the benefits are huge.
This was rendered in Karma which comes for free with Houdini. Overall, render time per pass was between 1 to 5 minutes with denoising. Caching times were similar. If I had to give a cumulative average, I would say my laptop managed to create each frame in around 10 minutes. The problem I encountered was my lack of RAM (16GB) and limited disk space (500GB total). These two factors are the ones impacting the quality the most, as I don’t have many alternatives at the moment to create bigger caches.
But, VFX is about finding solutions. We always manage to make things work, with or without resources.