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Parameters ¶
Save to Disk
Begins the render with the last render control settings.
Controls
Opens the Render Control window, which allows you to adjust the render parameters before rendering.
Render with Take
Uses the settings in a particular take while rendering. Choose Current to use the current take when rendering.
Set Valid Frame Range
Only render frames in a start/end range, at a given frame increment. This is off, the node renders every frame.
Tip
If you just want to check something, you can specify a temporary sub-range to render without changing the node. Click Render Control at the top of the parameters and specify the Frame Range there.
Composite ¶
COP Path
Path to the COP node to render.
Override Default Res
Turn this on to specify a custom resolution to render at. If this is off, the node uses the COP node’s resolution.
Resolution
Resolution of rendered images.
Output Picture
File path to write the rendered images to.
Image Format
File format for the rendered images.
Create Intermediate Directories
When turned on, creates intermediate parent directories for output files as needed. Currently only applies to generated scripts, images, and shadow maps.
Color Plane
Plane to use as the RGB channels.
Alpha Plane
Plane to use as the A channel (in RGBA image).
Output Colorspace
How to set the color space of the rendered images.
Manual Gamma/LUT: Conversion
Manually specify the gamma and lookup table file used to save images.
Autodetect from File
This uses the Houdini image library to determine the color space of the output image and transform to the appropriate space. For example, JPEG files will be saved in sRGB.
Use OpenColorIO
Use OpenColorIO to perform the color space transformations.
Bake to OpenColorIO Display/View
Color Space
When Output Colorspace is Use OpenColorIO, the output color space. The menu lists the color spaces from the OpenColorIO configuration file.
There are two additional items in the menu:
Parse Colorspace from File (automatic)
Use the OpenColorIO file parsing rules to detect the output color space by parsing the output file.
Look
When Output Colorspace is Use OpenColorIO, this is an OpenColorIO look to apply.
Display
When Output Colorspace is Use OpenColorIO and Color Space is Use OCIO Display View, this is the display to use. If this is default, the node uses the default display specified in the OpenColorIO configuration file.
View
When Output Colorspace is Use OpenColorIO and Color Space is Use OCIO Display View, this is the view for the display. If this is default, the node uses the default view for the specified display in the OpenColorIO configuration file.
Output Gamma
When Output Colorspace is Disable Colorspace Conversion, this is a manual gamma correction value to apply to images.
Output Frames Reused in Composite
Turn this on if your compositing network reads in previously completed frames to generate later frames. This disables threaded file writes and batch frame cooking.
Batch Cook Frames
Cooks frames in groups, rather than one by one. This can improve performance on multi-processor computers, for small-to-medium sized networks, which spend a higher percentage of their time preparing to cook a frame and writing the output image. This option generally makes no difference on single-processor computers. We recommend a batch size of 2, since any performance gain drops off quickly for larger batches. Batch cooking uses a bit more memory than frame-by-frame.
Reload All Files
Tell the compositing network to reload any cached files (for example, images loaded by the 
File COP).
Image Area ¶
Output Area
The area of the rendered frame to write to the output file.
For file formats that support “data window” or “crop” features such as OpenEXR, TIFF, and Houdini .pic,
the node will use that feature.
If the file format does not support this feature, the given area will be clipped from the rendered frame,
and any pixels outside the area will be black.
Frame
Render the full frame, will no cropping/clipping.
Crop Region
Crop to the sub-region specified below.
Frame + Surrounding Canvas
Render the total frame and areas outside the frame, then “crop” to the frame size. This can be useful for having “extra” imagery available “outside” the frame for compositing operations such as blur. If the crop area is smaller than the frame, this option will write the full frame.
Pixel / UV Crop
The left, bottom, right, and top of the crop region, in either pixels or UV coords.
Limit Canvas Pixels
When Output Area is Frame + Surrounding Canvas and this is on, limit the extra canvas to this many pixels to the left/right/above/below the frame area. This can help prevent accidentally writing out giant files.
Limit Canvas Percent
When Output Area is Frame + Surrounding Canvas and this is on, limit the extra canvas to percentage of the width and a percentage of the height of the full frame. For example, for a 640×480 image, set this to 10% would limit the extra area to 64 pixels on the left and right, and 48 pixels on the top and bottom. This can help prevent accidentally writing out giant files.
Auxiliary File 1-5 ¶
These parameters let you save planes into separate files.
Scripts ¶
A script command can be specified for execution at various execution points. The expression language selected for the script parameter determines whether the command is in hscript or python.
Prior to execution, this node is automatically set as the global current node.
To run statements from a file, specify the path to the file with
either a .cmd extension (when the language is set to Hscript) or a .py
extension (when the language is set to Python). Additional arguments to the
script can also be supplied. They will be parsed in a shell-like manner.
Pre-Render Script
Run this script before any rendering.
Pre-Frame Script
Run this script before each frame.
Post-Frame Script
Run this script after each frame.
Post-Render Script
Run this script after all rendering.
Locals ¶
N
Frame being rendered.
NRENDER
Total number of frames being rendered.
