I am trying to comp a few tga sequences and they always have randomly colored artifacts. The colored blocks seem to be completely random as cooking the same frame twice will often give different blocks. I have tried every setting I can fine. Some settings are better than others but none seem to make them go away. Any ideas?

Need more information, like the platform/version you're running on, hardware you're running, the version of Houdini, if you can repro with formats other than tga, if you can repro with a very simple network(such as literally comping one seqence OVER another) or if you need certain COPs to trigger it…

etc etc…pls post details folks!

It sounds like problems with your graphics card/driver, off the top of my head. I use targa all the time without problems…

Cheers,

J.C.

Sounds like you're using an older version of Houdini, likely 6.0 or 5.5. There were some outstanding bugs in those versions with caching that caused tiles to occasionally be blank, resulting in oddly colored square areas.

Houdini 6.1 fixed those issues, especially in later builds (250+).

I am using 6.1.208 and running XP Pro on a 3Ghz P4 with 512MB. It doesn't seem to happen very often in pic or jpg but very often in tga. It will sometimes do it even with 2 layers but gets worse with more layers.

Is there any way to convert a tga sequence to a pics sequence? If I could do that it may solve the problem.
BTW I am running a GeForce 256 Video card.

As Mark says, you should upgrade your version of Houdini…what you're running has indeed got problems. It's not related to targa - it's buggies. Unfortunately, the card you're using could also be giving you troubles elsewhere - as I recall that was literally the very first nvidia card with a GPU! Anyway, that's probably not related to this problem…

Cheers,

J.C.