This is probably dumb.

I did the ‘Wispy Smoke’ tutorial (from the online docs) but am using my own image sequence (looped) to map the particle driven geometry.

If I do an interactive render-what I call a (tab>Render draw a marquis)
I see the results I expect from cam1. But only with the ‘Default’ driver. But if I render a sequence the result renders distinctly ‘red’. I would also say the alphas don't match what I expect. I now see I get the same (red) result in the interactive render if I change ‘Default’ driver for ‘out/mantra1’ in the interactive render control as well.

BTW for rendering in the viewport - if I do the View:Mantra from the driver icon in the lower left of the viewport-I in fact see the result I expect (a grayish smoke).

BTW2 I am using the new beta .633 on windows xp.

BTW3 - the previous version of my scene isn't showing this rpoblem at all… hmmm

Any idea what sillyness I've come across?
It wouldn't be a license protection thing would it?

-ral(newbie)

I found the cause.
Its from setting the number of processors to ‘2’ in the render command.
If its default ‘1’ I am good.

Unless its a license protection it seems like a bug…

-ral

Hi,

If you're using Apprentice, there is only one mantra license though it does seems weird that it renders red. Can you test with another file or something simple?

Cheers!
steven

I should be using an Eval version of Master.

I'll try and simplify a scene and see if i can repro on a sphere.
It will probably be next week though…

Rendering on a single processor worked fine though.

-ral

Ok I've narrowed this down to a texture map refresh issue.
Houdini is not rendering ‘red’ exactly its rendering the shader (which happens to be reddish)-but not seeing the Texture Map parameter
when ‘number of processors’ is checked and is more than 1.
If 1 or unchecked altogether-then the texture map is persisted to mantra.

re-caching the particles doesn't help either.


-ral

That pinky-red colour is Mantra's default colour when it can't find a texture map. As an aside, I prefer the Softimage question-mark map, it's more obvious )

If you're using 2 CPUs, and you're on Windows, good luck ) If you're not using simple letter mappings then things get hairy on Windows with dual-cpu rendering and map paths. Someome who's dealt with this will have to help, I remember giving up eventually.

This is because when Mantra renders with 2 cpus it's actually “Hserver” that calls Mantra, and often the Hserver process isn't owned by you, and so your drive mounts might not be what you expect, or something like that….

Cheers,

Peter B

Indeed I think it amounts to something like that.
hserver is indeed being called.
Which explains why the texture that comes with the wispy smoke tutorial doesn't have an issue (installed inside Houdini's factory location).
Although our networks drives are mounted as drive letters?!

Seems like something that should get fixed for production pipelines on windows…

Thanks for the pbowmar
-ral

Try using unc paths rather than mapped drive letters. I can't remember but that might fix it. its either that or you have to reference maps locally.