Whitecaps object

The space or comma separated list of categories to which this object belongs.

Currently not supported for per-primitive material assignment (material SOP).

A list of patterns. Objects matching these patterns will reflect in this object. You can use wildcards (for example, key_*) and bundle references to specify objects.

You can also use the link editor pane to edit the relationships between lights and objects using a graphical interface.

The object:reflectmask property in Mantra is a computed property containing the results of combining reflection categories and reflection masks.

A list of patterns. Objects matching these patterns will be visible in refraction rays. You can use wildcards (for example, key_*) and bundle references to specify objects.

You can also use the link editor pane to edit the relationships between lights and objects using a graphical interface.

The object:refractmask property in Mantra is a computed property containing the results of combining reflection categories and reflection masks.

A list of patterns. Lights matching these patterns will illuminate this object. You can use wildcards (for example, key_*) and bundle references to specify lights.

You can also use the link editor pane to edit the relationships between lights and objects using a graphical interface.

The object:lightmask property in Mantra is a computed property containing the results of combining light categories and light masks.

Some volume primitives (Geometry Volumes, Image3D) can use a filter during evaluation of volume channels. This specifies the filter. The default box filter is fast to evaluate and produces sharp renders for most smooth fluid simulations. If your voxel data contains aliasing (stairstepping along edges), you may need to use a larger filter width or smoother filter to produce acceptable results. For aliased volume data, gauss is a good filter with a filter width of 1.5.

• point

• box

• gauss

• bartlett

• blackman

• catrom

• hanning

• mitchell

This specifies the filter width for the object:filter property. The filter width is specified in number of voxels. Larger filter widths take longer to render and produce blurrier renders, but may be necessary to combat aliasing in some kinds of voxel data.

Replaces any shaders with the default matte shader. The default matte shader is controlled using the vm_matteshader setting.

Shade every sample rather than shading micropolygon vertices. This setting enables the raytrace rendering on a per-object basis.

When micro-polygon rendering, shading normally occurs at micro-polygon vertices at the beginning of the frame. To determine the color of a sample, the corner vertices are interpolated. Turning on object:rayshade will cause the ray-tracing shading algorithm to be invoked. This will cause each sample to be shaded independently. This means that the shading cost may be significantly increased. However, each sample will be shaded at the correct time, and location.

Currently not supported for per-primitive material assignment (material SOP).

If enabled, this object’s rendered motion blur will be based upon the vector attribute named “v” in the geometry. The units of the attribute are in (1 unit/second).

Velocity motion blur should be used if it contains changing point counts since it cannot be rendered correctly with deformation motion blur. For example, a particle system with changing particle counts should use this option.

You can use Velocity blur on these types of objects as long as they have valid v attributes. Particles automatically have the “v” attribute so if you are rendering particles, simply enable this parameter.

This parameter controls the geometric subdivision resolution for all rendering engines and additionally controls the shading resolution for micropolygon rendering. With all other parameters at their defaults, a value of 1 means that approximately 1 micropolygon will be created per pixel. A higher value will generate smaller micropolygons meaning that more shading will occur - but the quality will be higher.

In ray tracing engines, shading quality only affects the geometric subdivision quality for smooth surfaces (NURBS, render as subdivision) and for displacements - without changing the amount of surface shading. When using ray tracing, pixel samples and ray sampling parameters must be used to improve surface shading quality.

The effect of changing the shading quality is to increase or decrease the amount of shading by a factor of vm_shadingquality squared - so a shading quality of 2 will perform 4 times as much shading and a shading quality of 0.5 will perform ¼ times as much shading.

This property controls the tesselation levels for nearly flat primitives. By increasing the value, more primitives will be considered flat and will be sub-divided less.

This property will cause this object to generate all the micro-polygons before the render begins. Ray tracing can be significantly faster at the cost of potentially huge memory requirements.

Possible values are off, on (kept in memory), and bounds (pre-compute bounds, but don’t keep all geometry in memory).

When ray-tracing, it’s more efficient to pre-dice all the geometry in the scene, rather than caching portions of the geometry and re-generating the geometry on the fly. This is especially true when global illumination is being computed (since there is less coherency among rays).

Currently not supported for per-primitive material assignment (material SOP).

When rendering a curve, turns the curve into a surface and dices the surface, running the surface shader on multiple points across the surface. This may be useful when the curves become curved surfaces, but is less efficient. The default is to simply run the shader on the points of the curve and duplicate those shaded points across the created surface.

If enabled, geometry that are facing away from the camera are not rendered.

Geometry SHOP used by the renderer to generate render geometry for this object.

Enables output of geometry when a procedural shader is assigned. If you know that the procedural you have assigned does not rely on geometry being present for the procedural to operate correctly, you can disable this toggle.

Render polygons as a subdivision surface. The creaseweight attribute is used to perform linear creasing. This attribute may appear on points, vertices or primitives.

Render the points of the geometry, and only the points. When this parameter is off, points (outside of particle systems) are not rendered. Two attributes control the point primitives if they exist.

Mantra will initialize the N global from the N attribute when rendering point primitives. When disabled (the default), point normals will be initialized to face the camera.

Render metaballs as volumes as opposed to surfaces.

Whether Mantra will try to prevent cracks.

Coving is the process of filling cracks in diced geometry at render time, where different levels of dicing side-by-side create gaps at T-junctions.

The default setting, Coving for displacement/sub-d, only does coving for surfaces with a displacement shader and subdivision surfaces, where the displacement of points can potentially create large cracks. This is sufficient for more rendering, however you may want to use Coving for all primitives if you are using a very low shading rate or see cracks in the alpha of the rendered image.

Do not use Disable coving. It has no performance benefit, and may actually harm performance since Houdini has to render any geometry visible through the crack.

This setting only applies to micropolygon rendering.

Whether mantra should compute the N attribute automatically. If the N attribute exists, the value will remain unchanged. However, if no N attribute exists, it will be created. This allows polygon geometry which doesn’t have the N attribute already computed to be smooth shaded.

Not supported for per-primitive material assignment (material SOP).

When geometry has shaders defined on a per-primitive basis, this parameter will override these shaders and use only the object’s shader. This is useful when performing matte shading on objects.

Not supported for per-primitive material assignment (material SOP).