Hi

I'm trying to render out image sequence of .exr's in Houdini. At the beginning when the scene was open single frame was possible to render as an ip name to see in mplay. However I cannot write to hard drives my sequence of files. Every time render stops in various % of frames and this message appear in the console : UT_NetPacket::read: No such file or directory.

I've already checked Antivirus and firewall and problem still remains.

What to do to be able to render out sequence ?

greetings

czaps

Looks like a path error. Sometimes Houdini forgets it's file paths, never understood why though. Try deleting the file location you set for saving the frames, and then re-apply it.

Looks like a path error. Sometimes Houdini forgets it's file paths, never understood why though. Try deleting the file location you set for saving the frames, and then re-apply it.

If I delete the path and re-apply it result is the same. Render hangs at 66% and cannot finish the animation render. On the disk I have only first frame saved ( not always) with proper name and extension but is 0 size on disk.

cheers

czaps

can you upload a file to look at?

Sure

Here it is the scene.

thanks

czaps

You have some pretty not optimal settings there, which as I assume all together crash Mantra.

1) You create big, dense cloud of overlapping particles (2mil. per sec), and try to render as tiny spheres (instead of render them as points).

2) You use MB PBR, but set diffuse limit to 0, so only specular rays are used.

3) …but your clay material doesn't have any specular defined.

4) You send to Mantra points with 13 float attributes, whereas only one v will be used in render time.

5) Particles are semi-transparent (opacity=0.6) what with previous points makes render really, really difficult.

6) Particles aren't cached on disk, but they weight >500MB per frame.

7) Geometry cash is too small for such a scene.

8) Generally PBR (not MP_PBR) will render faster such thing, as it doesn't have to refine geometry for secondary rays. It does motion blur better though…

9) If you really need transparency, I personally found taht BVH plays better for this, but it's also less stable - but at least renders your +3 million of particles with semi-transparency at PBR. (note: opacity=1 -> render time: 1.5 minute, opacity=0.6 -> render time: +5minute at frame 32 or so… )

Big thanks for great instructions SYmek !!

Just starting exploring Houdini and was courious about particles render times in comparison to maya MR and Vray which I use. I will check your scene to find out the settings. Yesterday I tried to render simple geometry without particles and I could only saved sequence to disk one time. The rest of my tries ended up with same error like in that scene UT_NetPacket::read: No such file or directory…

big thanks again

czaps

czaps
Big thanks for grat instructions SYmek !!

you welcome.

Just starting exploring Houdini and was courious about particles render time comparisin to maya which I use.

You mean Maya hardware for particles? I would be interested also, as I haven't tested it for a couple of years. In Mantra I could render something like 48million of particles in 8GB. Render time really isn't much related to particles count, but rather their scale on screen, sampling, light/shadow computation, it's ranges 3~20 minutes.

H12 though really changes the game in terms of particles count and render times.

Yesterday I tried to render simple geometry without particles and I could only saved sequence to disk one time. The rest of my tries ended up with same error like in that scene UT_NetPacket::read: No such file or directory…

I can't be sure but I suppose this meant Mantra crashed during previous frame. Anyhow your scene was hanging at 66% at first, then rendered nicely frame by frame, so I hope this was it.


cheers,
skk.

Also another thing…

When I try to cache out those particles nothing is being saved on disk as .bgeo in ROP output driver. It looks like my particles are cached only on the fly without writing proper .bgeo to disk . Nothing is there after caching ;(….

Scene is rendering now without particles ( due to cache file gone) and also it's rendering on the fly without writing to disk …


czaps

Finally it's rendering my first Mantra simulation

Anyway I have difficulties with writing files to disk and caching . Sometimes Mantra saving it's sometimes not. Dunno why ….

greetings

czaps