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Overview ¶
This pane can be used to create and control Houdini clone processes which do live rendering in a background process, cloning (and continuously updating) the contents of your hip file. The clone processes use complete non-graphical Houdini processes to cook the LOP network and render the images, just like live rendering in the viewport in your interactive Houdini session. The images are then sent back to the interactive Houdini session for viewing.
Each clone can deviate from the exact state of the interactive Houdini session by rendering a different frame number, or using different global context option values. Both of these per-clone values can be expressed in terms of the current session values, so a clone can be set to show five frames ahead of the current frame number. Or the Shot context option value can be set to one higher than the current shot number. Each clone also has controls for which LOP node to render, what camera to look through, which render settings prim to use, and which render delegate to use. Because the rendering process is the same as for viewport live rendering, any render delegate that works in the Houdini viewport should also work in a clone process. The returned image is always a single AOV, but you can choose which AOV to return from each clone. The available AOVs are determined by the render settings and the render delegate.
Clone processes may be launched on the local machine or on a render farm given an approriate launcher plugin. The local launcher and an HQueue launcher are provided with Houdini.
TIP: Use multiple clones with different Shot context option values to see the effect of sequence level changes on several shots at once.
TIP: Improve interactivity by using the Houdini GL render delegate in the viewport showing proxy geometry, but use a local clone running a live final frame render see the effect of your changes on the final shot. Because this full render is in a separate process, you are protected from crashes in the renderer, and your interactive performance will not be affected by the slower update times that may impact a full render.
How to ¶
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Create and launch a new clone |
Use the control menu in the bottom right corner of the pane. Choose one of the launcher options from the menu. Most launchers will require some additional configuration in a popup dialog before the clone will launch. Alternatively, an existing clone can be duplicated using the |
Connect or disconnect a clone |
Clones can be connected or disconnected by clicking on the |
See the render from a clone |
The When a clone is launched, it often won’t produce any image at first. Make sure to set the |
Let a clone render finish |
Sometimes it is useful to let a render keep running while you continue to work interactively. The second column of the clone table shows if the clone is receiving ( |
Edit a clone |
Most values in the clone table can be edited by double clicking in the cell. Multiple clones can be modified at once by selected multiple rows, the choosing |
Get error information from clones |
The Log Viewer pane can be used to enable |
or 
icons in the first column of the clone table. Multiple clones can be controlled simultaneously by selecting them in the table, and choosing 
button in the lower right corner of the pane will show a small thumbnail in a column of this pane. A 
) or ignoring (
) updates from the interactive Houdini process. Click the icon in this column to change the update state of a clone. The render continues in either case. This column only controls whether or not updates are applied to the scene.Toolbar ¶
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Controls the display of the Image column, which shows small thumbnail preview images from each clone process. |
Control Menu |
This menu provides the ability to create new clones, clean up unused clones, and configure the operation of this pane.
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