Hello everyone.

I have 3delight working fine as ROP, but when I try to create my own shaders it is still calling prman.exe with the subsequent error. How can I tell Houdini to use 3Delight instead Prman.

I have installed the plug in for Prman, does it not work with 3Delight?

Cheers!

found something here, will follow it …


http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=5069&highlight=3delight [sidefx.com]

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=5271&highlight=3delight [sidefx.com]

I put a tutorial (http://www.plastickitten.net/wordpress/tutorials/using-houdini-with-3delight/ [plastickitten.net]) on my website a while ago.

Cheers,

Moritz

Yeo, I was following it, Cheers !!!!

Hi javi, nice to see with Houdini and 3D Light.
Well I have seen the Mauritius tutorial about H and 3DLight, and I have a couple of advices that complements his excelllent explanation.
To automate the render setup use presets.
Look at the little arrow button in the top part of the ROP parameters, close to the operator name, this button opens the presets menu, you can configure your RenderMan ROP to have the needed settings to work with 3D Light and save them.
I have attached a file with the presets needed to work with 3D Light, at least the minimum I have seen in the tutorial, I haven't use 3DLight never, only prman, so maybe something is missing but the idea is clear.
Uncompress and copy the rman.idx file in your:
$HOME/houdini8.8/presets/Driver
Create the needed directories in cas eyou need them.
Now open the button I told youe, you should be able to see at the bottom of the menu an entry with the name 3DLight, select it and look at your ROP parameters
Another option is to use a creation script to customize the RenderMan ROP creation to be automaticallly setup for 3DLight, is a good option is you are going to use 3DLight all the time, see the creation scripts help in the help browser here:
hdox/houdini/content/commands/guide/hscript_events.html
And finally and the best solution following the actual houdini philosophy is to create an HDA and encapsulate it in an OTL that makes all the bells and whistles that you need.
Other interesting discussion maybe related to your problem:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=4613&highlight=air [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=4858&highlight=air [sidefx.com]
Finally and advice is to try the AIR renderer, is quite good and comes with a complete Houdini integration. Is not free, but cheaper than prman:
http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/air.html [sitexgraphics.com]
I told to Gonzalo Rueda one year ago about this render engine and he was very impressed about it.
It support implicit surfaces by default, for example Frantic films uses it to render their fluid simulations, I am sure this point will catch your attention
Ok I hope this helps Javi, if you need more help you know where I am.

Hey Pablo, how is it going?

I have 3delight working fine with Houdini, hte ROP part was easy. The problem comes when I try to create my own shaders on the VEX viewer. It does not compile them using 3delight (shaderdl.exe). Everything works fine with prman ( and looks like also with air despite I haven´t tried it yet…)

More on:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=5816 [sidefx.com]

THe hscript stuff looks promising, definitely.

Thanks for the advice and catch you soon!

Javier

Here is a lamer asking a question:
Moritz's tutorial mentions creation of two shell scripts to handle the re-mapping of render/shader commands. What exactly are these file and how can they be created? I am running Windows…
10x for your answers

Unfortunately Windows … what I did was to rename renderdl.exe to prman.exe, which is what Houdini looks for.

On the hrmanshader.exe, I recompiled the hrmanshader.c file substituting the line


#define COMPILER “shader”


with


#define COMPILER “shaderdl”


Route to hrmanshader.c :

$HFS/houdini/public

Place it once compiled in:

$HFS/bin

It is not working 100% for me anyways ….

:roll:

javierRomero
Unfortunately Windows … what I did was to rename renderdl.exe to prman.exe, which is what Houdini looks for.

If you try to change the render command in the ROP parameters from prman to renderdl it doesn't work?
It should work and then you don't need to rename the file.
I am Linux so I am not sure 100% about this.

javierRomero
On the hrmanshader.exe, I recompiled the hrmanshader.c file substituting the line


#define COMPILER “shader”


with


#define COMPILER “shaderdl”


Route to hrmanshader.c :

$HFS/houdini/public

Place it once compiled in:

$HFS/bin

It is not working 100% for me anyways ….

:roll:

Thinking a little about this, I forget the hrmanshader command …
It is know working for you, now your shaders are compiled using shaderdl?
I think that the best is to add several lines to the hrmanshader.c file to check some environmet variables that controls what compiler to use, or if can access to bash, in case you are using cigwin, create a wraper script like Mauritius suggested to override the call to hrmanshder command and then do whatever you need.
Maybe this will be the option I will use If I was in Linux.
Like you are in Windows the first option, the method you have used recompiling the command is the best.