I feel really dumb for not being able to figure this out…
When I open one of the “demo” files that came with houdini, ex. the airplane, the head (organic mesh), arm/character rig etc, and try to render it, the renderview comes up as a blank black box…the only thing i see is an outline in white of the object *only* when it is set on greyscale channel
thanks for any help!
render problem--probably something simple =P
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- budgiekid
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- goldfarb
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- budgiekid
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it may be something with some basic settings, i'm just learning my way around houdini and right now i find everything a bit confusing….its very non-traditional =P
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- the_squid
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I would need to see the file to really troubleshoot this. In the meantime maybe I can help with a few suggestions:
Off the top of my head, here are some possibilities:
1.) You are rendering using the wrong camera. Highly unlikely since you say you see a white outline in the greyscale channel. Speaking of which, what greyscale channel are you talking about? Are you sure you're not looking at the alpha channel?
2.) If you're seeing the object you render in the alpha, it could be that your scene has no lights, so you see black in RGB and then solid white in alpha. This means your object is in the scene, just not being lit. You'll need to add some point lights if you want to see anything, or an ambient light.
3.) There's always the possibility your scene was setup to render as a matte… although this too is unlikely. In your shaders, create a VEX_supermaterial and use that as your objects surface. VEX_supermaterial will create a generic white phong shader. As long as you point to this as your shader you can rule the shader out as being a problem.
4.) If all else fails you may want to throw a FACET sop at the end of your sop chain and select “compute normals.” If your normals are messed up this should help, and if they're reversed throw a POINT sop after the facet sop and set all your normals to be 0-$NX,0-$NY,0-$NZ (this will reverse the normals)
5.) Are you sure you're not just closing your eyes when you render? Just kidding.
6.) There's also the possibility (if you've checked all other possibilities) that you're object is set to render as a matte object in its render settings. These are seperate from shaders I believe. At the object level, look at the parameters for the object you want to render. Go to the render tab and make sure the “matte” parameter is set to 0.
7.) If you've checked every single thing so far and it's STILL not rendering, maybe you have a light mask set in your object that is keeping it from recognizing the lights in your scene. At the object level, look at the parameters for the object you want to render. Under the shading tab, there's a parameter for “light mask” make sure it's either set to * or that it's set to use the lights in your scene. You can always click the + button to the righ to select the lights you want to affect your object.
Other than those suggestions, the only other thing I could recommend is giving your file out to one of us so we can take a look at it. Good luck!
Off the top of my head, here are some possibilities:
1.) You are rendering using the wrong camera. Highly unlikely since you say you see a white outline in the greyscale channel. Speaking of which, what greyscale channel are you talking about? Are you sure you're not looking at the alpha channel?
2.) If you're seeing the object you render in the alpha, it could be that your scene has no lights, so you see black in RGB and then solid white in alpha. This means your object is in the scene, just not being lit. You'll need to add some point lights if you want to see anything, or an ambient light.
3.) There's always the possibility your scene was setup to render as a matte… although this too is unlikely. In your shaders, create a VEX_supermaterial and use that as your objects surface. VEX_supermaterial will create a generic white phong shader. As long as you point to this as your shader you can rule the shader out as being a problem.
4.) If all else fails you may want to throw a FACET sop at the end of your sop chain and select “compute normals.” If your normals are messed up this should help, and if they're reversed throw a POINT sop after the facet sop and set all your normals to be 0-$NX,0-$NY,0-$NZ (this will reverse the normals)
5.) Are you sure you're not just closing your eyes when you render? Just kidding.
6.) There's also the possibility (if you've checked all other possibilities) that you're object is set to render as a matte object in its render settings. These are seperate from shaders I believe. At the object level, look at the parameters for the object you want to render. Go to the render tab and make sure the “matte” parameter is set to 0.
7.) If you've checked every single thing so far and it's STILL not rendering, maybe you have a light mask set in your object that is keeping it from recognizing the lights in your scene. At the object level, look at the parameters for the object you want to render. Under the shading tab, there's a parameter for “light mask” make sure it's either set to * or that it's set to use the lights in your scene. You can always click the + button to the righ to select the lights you want to affect your object.
Other than those suggestions, the only other thing I could recommend is giving your file out to one of us so we can take a look at it. Good luck!
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