Hello Everyone,
I have my project ready in Houdini, i just want to render it out. The problem is that I'm not able to render the different passes out properly. On youtube I can find just really old tutorial about Houdini 12 while I'm using Houdini 16.5… For example a guy showed how to render the diffuse and reflection… And he did it simply by on the ‘Extra Image Planes’ tab selecting ‘direct diffuse’ and ‘direct reflection’…But these options are not available in Houdini 16, or they are probably just called in a different way…But I can't understand which one I have to chose, for example, for the diffuse pass I read ‘dffuse color’, ‘diffuse ray level’,'color'…so I don't understand which one i have to select. Any tutorial that could help me with that? Thanks

Hi there.

Did you ever find out how to do that? I too am migrating and testing out the render and setting up simple basic render settings is proving to be a chore! This seems to be a poorly documented part of houdini as I have searched the internet and I cant seem to locate a solid answer. The AOVs I need are:

Diffuse
Specular (whether combined or separated as direct or indirect)

This page details the info on Image Planes: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/render/deeprasters.html [www.sidefx.com]

The the key is the basic render passes {diffuse, reflect, refract, sss, etc…} are called Export Components and the active ones for the render are listed out at the top of the Extra Image Planes tab in the Images section of the Mantra render node. A list of the common export components is already in place as the default when you create the Mantra node. Just delete the ones you do not need. Then the source of the render samples for each of those active export components are selected below.

So to get the diffuse and reflection pass with all lighting (direct and indirect) you would have ‘diffuse’ and ‘reflect’ entered in the Export Components field and 'Combined Lighting (per-component)' checked off from the list below. To get passes for the initial rays activate 'Direct Lighting (per-component)' where as 'Indirect Lighting (per-component)' will render the results of the rays bouncing off surfaces. Try a render with all three checked to see the differences.

You can even get render passes per light (as well as many more) by adding Extra Image Planes at the bottom of the Extra Image Planes tab and selecting from the popdown list on the VEX Variable parameter.

All of the active Image Planes will be bundled up into one image file per frame in image formats like EXR that support multiple image planes or can be rendered to separate files for formats that don't. When you render to M-Play with the exr file format you can use the drop down selector at the top left of the M-Play window to see each layer. It is super cool!

Hi,

I know this post is a bit old but I am messing around with rendering in Mantra with Houdini 16.5.571. I cannot seem to get the Indirect and Direct passes to work correctly for any export components. If you check Direct and Indirect passes it is putting everything into Indirect and nothing goes into Direct. I have turned all of my limits above 1 or a little more just to be sure there were multiple bounces but still, direct pass is empty and it is all fed into indirect. Is this a bug or just the way mantra works now or am I missing something (potentially something very simple that I am overlooking)? I used Mantra before in past versions and it worked fine. I have tried this in a couple different builds as well. (I know was build 16.5.496) Any help is appreciated, thanks!