I am a little confused. I can't seem to locate some features in V7.

Technical directors can respond to rigging changes using tools such as Capture Layers, Capture Blending and Attribute Transfer.

I am unable to locate Capture Layers and Capture Blending SOPs. They are not available in SOP menus. Where are they?

Houdini 7 also includes enhanced Renderman Support with an interactive shader-building-environment and IPR (Interactive Photorealistic Rendering). This lets artists create Renderman shaders without relying on programming support. Networks created in the Mantra (VEX) shader builder can be copied and pasted into the Renderman shader builder to help artists develop their looks more quickly. IPR-based test renderings can then be generated right in your 3D view using Renderman.

How exactly is this done? This does not make sence to me at all. How do you paste a bunch of nodes into shader code. This is description escapes me.

Houdini 7 lets character animators enjoy significant time savings by making important timing decisions in the Flipbook

Once again. Where is this flipbook?

DavidRindner
I am unable to locate Capture Layers and Capture Blending SOPs. They are not available in SOP menus. Where are they??

Hmmn, I only see CaptureLayerPaint myself.

DavidRindner
How exactly is this done? This does not make sence to me at all. How do you paste a bunch of nodes into shader code. This is description escapes me.

There are RSL contexts in VOPs now, that's what they meant.

Hi David,

I guess the descriptions are too general as they were meant more as a “what new types of capabilities are possible” as opposed to exactly where to find it in the interface. If the latter case was done, it would be too long as to be useful as an overview of new features. However, since they have managed to get you to ask about them, I guess they've done their job.

Technical directors can respond to rigging changes using tools such as Capture Layers, Capture Blending and Attribute Transfer.

Capture Layers refers to the new “Paint Capture Layer” tool in the Object Viewer (look under Character in the Object Viewer's Tab menu) and its corresponding CaptureLayerPaint SOP. It's the replacement for the old CapturePaint SOP. The problem with the old one was that it simply kept absolute differences in the painted result and its input. So changing the weighting upstream would have disasterous results downstream. The new CaptureLayerPaint intelligently stores it results so that it can be combined with changing weights upstream in an intuitive manner. It also offers new options for manipulating weights in the current layer as opposed to operating on the final weights.

Capture Blending refers to the ability to blend capture weights with the new AttribComposite SOP. A new SOP was added so that it can take advantage of the special structure of the capture weight attributes.

Attribute Transfer refers to the new AttribTransfer SOP. This new SOP allows you to transfer attributes from one geometry to another independent of topology by looking at the spatial location of the points. Handy uses include transferring uv's, capture weights, and more.

Houdini 7 also includes enhanced Renderman Support with an interactive shader-building-environment and IPR (Interactive Photorealistic Rendering). This lets artists create Renderman shaders without relying on programming support. Networks created in the Mantra (VEX) shader builder can be copied and pasted into the Renderman shader builder to help artists develop their looks more quickly. IPR-based test renderings can then be generated right in your 3D view using Renderman.

If you go into the VEX Builder, there are new RSL items in the Tab menu under Generators. This allows you to create renderman shaders using VOPs (ie. shader networks which output renderman .sl). The VOPs more or less match the ones found in the shader network contexts for mantra. So one can usually just copy/paste VOP nodes from one context to another.

As for IPR test renderings, objects/geometry assigned with Renderman shaders can now be previewed directly in the viewer via the Render tool. It's found in the viewer's Tab menu under Generic. Previously, this tool would only render with VEX (ie. Mantra) SHOP assignments.

Houdini 7 lets character animators enjoy significant time savings by making important timing decisions in the Flipbook

The animator keyframes the poses of their character and then scopes the relevant channels that he/she wishes to adjust the timing on. Then by right-clicking on the Render button in the viewer (located a few buttons to the left of the camera menu), you can now choose “View: Flipbook”. This dialog by itself allows one to produce OpenGL renderings of the viewport.

If the “Scoped Channel Key Frames Only” and “Enable Block Editing” options are enabled to generate the flipbook, the resulting mplay viewer that comes up will have a dopesheet in the playbar. These options output an image for each key that exist in the scoped channels. Now in mplay, the animator can quickly adjust the timing of keys in mplay's playbar using the dopesheet playbar. Since it's just images, the timing adjustment is extremely fast. Playing back the images in mplay looks as if all the channels were keyed using constant values.

When the timing adjustments are finished, the “Export Channel Blocking” option is chosen from the top Tools menu in mplay which adjusts the corresponding keys in Houdini itself to match the changes done in mplay.

The value in this tool is that it significantly speeds up the “pose blocking” workflow done in the initial stages of character animation.

Hope this helps.

Hi David,
Incidentally, Attribute Transfer is the single most important new feature, IMHO. We have used it here (R+H) on almost every single project done in Houdini 7. It's just mind-bogglingly powerful. You can transfer UV coordinates to things that normally could not hold UVs (like fluids or dissolving objects) and a million other things.

Cheers,

Peter B

I am familiar with Attrib transfer. I am finishing up a job at D2. We are using 7.2 DOPS, and Attrib Xfer figures. I am VERY impressed with 7.2. It does not feel like Beta. It feels like like gold (production version). I designed, and deployed, for D2, a custom volume fracturing pipeline. That procedurally fractures animated and deforming geo. Which is passed on to DOPs for dynamic fragmentation. I am eager to describe it, once the job I am on delivers, and D2 is OK with release of details. I am curious if R+H has as many custom Houdini tools as D2.

DaveR

Before SESI gets inundated with requests for H7.2 thinking that it is an incremental upgrade, it is most certainly not. This is H8.0. We usually bump version numbers once we get the beta well under way as this affects existing licenses.

H7.2 should be considered pre-alpha. FYI, if you use alpha software from SESI, we reserve the right to change any feature such that previous .hip files may no longer be compatible from build to build.

Given that, yes H8.0 is pretty stable which speaks volumes about our R&D.