Hi,

When I specify a new image plane, lets call it “AOVrefl”, and render out an image the channels are named:

AOVrefl.r
AOVrefl.g
AOVrefl.b

even though the channel name entry is empty. This makes it highly annoying to work with in Fusion as we have to select the correct channels for each loader as Fusion is expecting the channels to be called r g b with no prefix.

Is there any way to not get the image plane name appended channel name?

john

This occurs when setting your mantra node to save out diffrent files when the files types are the same as the main output.

To be honest the naming of different files should not take on the VEX variables channel name in anyway unless specfied i.e when a name has been added to the channel name.

I think this comes from the change that allowed us to save out different exr files rather then the one multilayer exr.

I can hazard a guess that the code is checking if the file type is EXR and the extra image planes are saving out diffrent file name with exr its using the channel naming that is used for saving a multilayered exr file.

Seems like this is a bug or we need a RFE. Does anyone know of any work arounds? As I cant see one and its really nasty to be honest, the fact digital fusion doesnt open these correctly with out manualy setting the R G B channel names and they dont open at all in photoshop.

Thanks
Nick

I would say that unique naming channels in EXR is mandatory, so I really don't understand what you're expecting from Houdini here. Exr file can consists with arbitrary number of channels but every channel has to have its own name. Thus as I suspect, RGB are named by Houdin R G B as this is a convention specified by OpenEXR standard: http://www.openexr.com/TechnicalIntroduction.pdf [openexr.com]
but any additional channel need to be named differently. I would say that this is a problem of Fusion which is not flexible enough. Maybe some Lua script or custom macro could help?

BTW: Can Fusion handle more then this 15 channels specified in GUI?


sy.

Hello Sy,

unique channel names is fine if there is only one output image file and makes total sense. The thing is that we are outputting image planes to seperate exr files and we would like the data to be in the rgb channels.

And of course, true to form, I have found the soulution while writing this email It appears I need to add “C” in the channel name to get the VEX variable data into the rgb channel of the respective exr…. hmm obvious really.

Thanks

John

oh, great!
Cheers,
sy.

Fusion is really crap for working with layered exr's efficiently:
- You can't spread the goods from one loader because the channel boolean tool doesn't support arbitrary channels (only the loader itself lets you choose planes).
- So, you are forced to use separate loaders of the same file to access the separate planes, and it seems to load the entire exr file even if you set it to read just one plane!

“It appears I need to add ”C“ in the channel name to get the VEX variable data into the rgb channel of the respective exr…. hmm obvious really.”

This Should be defaulted at rendertime if no name has been set and your outputs are all diffrent files :¬) Solves all this running about looking for solutions if it worked as people expected.

Nicely found John