Hi all,

I am trying to instance a tree (from a delayed load shader) and randomising its size and rotation.

But it seems that the single tree has the scene lights baked into it aswell (mantra archive creates a .bgeo and an .ifd file).

So when I am reading the disk files and rotating the instances, the original baked lighting keeps showing up on the rotated instances…

Is there a way to just save geometry and shader information onto disk (no lighting info to the .ifd file)?

I tried turning all lights off before writing to disk but it keeps having the same issue.

Thanks

This is limitation of Instance.
When you render .ifd, it does not have any relation to Houdini scene. All required data like geometry, shader and light already have been written in .ifd file. If you exclude lighting information from .ifd. Then mantra will not understand from where to take this information because it reads only .ifd not .hip. So mantra will render only black frames.
I think in your case you should not be able to use instances.

You do use bgeo to save geometry? What is your process of writing geometry and material, do you use Archive Generator ?

Thanks, good to know that there is no relation when rendering .ifd and the houdini scene.

So no additional lighting can affect the render of the .ifds? Been busy with work now, but I will try some tests soon.

Just found out that the problem resides in my tree model. It seems that light intensity varies according to the rotation of the model. Depends on the number and orientation of each leaf, so it catches more light when there happens to be a larger number of leaves orientated to a certain angle…

Yep, using mantra archive generator to write out geometry and .ifd files.

delayed load simply loads the geometry and optionally material archive from disk at rendertime
but lighting/lights are not saved in material archive .ifd therefore not loaded by delayed load, the scene lights are used to shade the geometry, it would be useless if the lighting was baked in