MartybNz
Have you tested it?

Yes, I did for several months until I changed my system to using Linux completely due to some programming requirements earlier this year.

Since then some features have been added to the renderer, most notably hair/fur and Softimage's ICE attributes. It's very stable, can handle large scenes and renders very quickly. It's not as scalable as Octane though if used in a multi-gpus setup, but the fundamental architecture (out of core design) enables the renderer to handle large and complex geometry, even if the geometry size is bigger than the gpu ram, which is something that can't be done by Octane.

I was able to produce flicker free final animation render using the renderer in a very short time. Check out their websites, I know a few projects which are using the renderer in full production environment.

If the community can convince the developers, then perhaps they can have their renderer compiled for Houdini integration on all platforms during their participating media rendering development. The code for their renderer is designed to be multi-platform from the very beginning.

Cheers,

OpenCL for cloth simulation.

Hi all,

Has anyone tested Redshift GPU renderer? It has a very good integration with Softimage and Maya and is being actively developed with good customer service and support. The renderer has supported hair and fur, and after version 1.0 they will focus on volumetric rendering. Their beta version is being used in a production environment already. The renderer is designed using an out of core architecture where the scene geometry won't be limited by the gpu RAM amount.

Check it out at redshift3d.com. I would suggest to the community to contact them and ask them to port their renderer to Houdini. They have a plan to support Houdini but their main focus after supporting Softimage and Maya would be to support 3dMax and other dcc packages after that. Probably if the community can suggest to them to also develop a version for Houdini at the same time, that would be awesome.

Thanks.

Cheers,

jordibares
As an industry you can see lots of companies are finally embracing it and there is more demand than ever for all sorts of positions, if anything, it is the FX side that is the lesser problem as we try to move to areas Houdini is not very well known yet very capable.

For example, I took it as my challenge to get into character animation and rigging in Houdini given there are very very few people doing that. Then I discover how it works and was blown away by the possibilities.

Right now I am handling a complex shot with 100 characters, all mocap with different levels of filtering, constraints, multiple meshes per asset and works very well. In fact, I doubt I could have put together 100 characters in Softimage and move it. You know Softimage was never great with tons objects.

Good Lighters are also need, good animators too… I feel there will be a demand for houdini artists for quite a while so looks promising.

What advice can you give on facial rig in Houdini (muscle based or bone based)?

Thanks.

Hi all,

I feel that rigging and weighting are a bit slower in Houdini compared to XSI, but weighting especially is much more predictable and easier to handle in Houdini.

And what about other aspects like motion retargeting (MOTOR), motion plotting (Animate->Tools-> Plot), deep character referencing and animation layering? Those features are absolutely crucial for a team of animators to work in parallel.

Also, is there a reference on how to build muscle based facial rig in Houdini?

Thanks.

Cheers,

Hi all,
I think Softimage users should highlight several of Softimage's strong points in CA tools like motion retargeting, character referencing and a few others so that the concepts can be streamlined further in Houdini either using existing tools or to be developed next.

Hoping that SideFX would grab this chance to increase Houdini's market share.

Cheers,

I am in full agreement with mnemonicimage regarding character animation tools in Houdini. Any pointers on complete character animation tutorials in Houdini (from rigging to animation with lip-syncing, and a bit on pipeline workflow - like retargeting, animation + cloth and such)?

TIA.

TheUsualAlex
You can return the license via the License administrator, then redeem your license again on your new machine, regardless of OS. Beware, however, you may only be able to do this for about 3 times.

Just curious, what would happen if it's more than 3 times? Some company would require the user to pay a small amount of transfer fee to be able to transfer 3 more times after that. What's the SideFX's policy on this?

mantragora
We had some problems in opening big scenes on Ubuntu, while the same scene was not a problem for Windows 7 or OpenSuse.
But something more surprising was that OpenGL worked better on Windows 7 than on any Linux distro. You wouldn't see difference when you have all effects turned off, but as soon as you pumped everything on, in the same scene, when you where doing 180-rotation in viewport, you could only see three frames from this rotation on Linux (begin, 90 degrees later and 180 degrees later) while on Windows it rotated smoothly. So it depends.

Test it and see what suits you the best.

try to check at two places;

libGL.so* should point to the native driver (not the open source one), and another is libglx.so*. These are usually two files that could affect X11 windowing and OpenGL greatly. If libGL* is not written over during any xorg update, then check on the other one.

Also you can try to run glxgears from command line to check if your X11 is using the right glx module.

Hi all,

Since multicore cpus are just getting more - cores, I guess multithreading is the way to go and Houdini is sure enough being developed to take advantage of that. But just wanna confirm, is the current version of Houdini viewport is fully multithreaded?

Thanks.

regards,
Faizol

edward
The situation is free to change depending on your OS, and if on Linux, your Linux distribution. Since you have a way to test for UCS2 or UCS4, you can always test which one Houdini is using by running your python code snippet in the Python Shell (inside Houdini).

I think nobody would complain anything about that. That's just a nature in heterogeneous environment, which is I think a plus indeed.

The only hiccup (and this is not just on python in particular), is the lack of basic documentations to at least enable the user to have a proper starting point rather than just shooting in the dark from nowhere. Since the setup is already in a heterogeneous environment, having just a bit of a hint or something would be sufficient enough.

Anyways, I'll try to contribute any good findings back to the community, maybe through odwiki.

Thanx for helping.

cheers,
Faizol

edward
Embedded python can either be UCS2 or UCS4.

actually, I'm just curious, is there any documented materials for users to know which one they are using? Otherwise it'll be like shooting in the dark for users if we have to go through like this again.

The one that I installed on my Fedora is the debian version with gcc 4.3, not the redhat version. And the embedded python on that is a UCS2 version. So I guess that the ones on Linux distribution is standardized on UCS2?

As per wx toolkit, what about the wx-ansi requirement? Is it localized to only windows platform, or is it also should be the way for other platform as well? I spent a few days trying to figure out how to get wx-ansi working with Houdini on Linux platform but at the end it's wx-unicode that actually works. It would be helpful if we have a bit more information on that in the documentation.

thanx.

best regards,
Faizol

edward
Ok, so I think your problem is that on Fedora, python is built with ucs2 whereas on most other platforms (and Houdini) builds python with ucs4. So if you want to compile your own plugins for Houdini's python distribution, you should compile them for ucs4. I've never tried compiling pyqt or wxPython but I'm betting that “–disable-unicode” is the WRONG thing to do. I suggest you do some reading and figure out how to compile for ucs4.

Thanx. I got it solved. Actually, for Fedora 11 platform, the source code has to be compiled with unicode=ucs2 all the way from wx source to the site-packages installation. And the wx folder to be copied into houdini's python folder is the unicode version, not the ansi ones. I guess it would be helpful if some of the documentation materials can be updated or at least available online via wiki or something. I'm not sure if the wx-ansi version is meant only for windows platform?

Regarding other platforms, here is python code to test if the embedded interpreter has ucs2 or ucs4 so the source can be compiled accordingly. About other Linux distributions, I believe the embedded python is the same across all Linux distributions (kindly please correct me if I'm wrong here).

The code:

if (len(u'\U00010800') == 1):
print(“UCS4”)
else: #len is 2 in UCS2 builds
print (“UCS2”)

thanx again.

best regards,
Faizol

Hi,

Thanx for replying.

Sorry that I didn't make make it clear regarding the platform. Regarding searching through the forum, actually I did that, but couldn't find anything on ansi compilation of wxpython and pyqt and nothing much on the right compilation options used.

Noted that in your reply, you mentioned for the toolkit to be compiled with either usc2 or ucs4 option. Is it possible to get some tips on the proper compilation flags with unicode ucs2 or ucs4?

Actually, I did successfully compiled the toolkit the first time using one of the two flags above but I had other problem after that, of which I asked about it here too;

link: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=17313 [sidefx.com]

“Now every time the toolkit library is called, I'll encounter either PyUnicodeUCS2_AsLatin1String or PyUnicodeUCS2_FromEncodedObject error from the library. ”

Since it's obvious that I missed the right compile flags, would anyone kindly show the right options of compiling the toolkit here? I really appreciate it, and no doubt that will benefit other users as well.

Back to the problem, my platform is Fedora 11. As per compilation,
I compiled python 2.5.4 with –disable-unicode flag.

As per wxpython, the setup.py was run with UNICODE=0 flag to disable unicode. The compilation snippet is at this link (I tried to post the compilation output here but it seems that the forum cut off some of the outputs);

http://groups.google.com/group/wxpython-users/browse_thread/thread/11b45ff98a326aad# [groups.google.com]



I really appreciate any help.

Thank you.

best regards,
Faizol

hi everyone,

I have a problem in compiling pyqt and wxpython to conform to the embedded python that comes with Houdini. The one with Houdini is compiled as an ansi version of the python interpreter.

A reply from pyqt mailing list a bit dissappointing. Quoting the reply directly;
“Building without Unicode support isn't supported. You'll just have to hack
at the code until it compiles.”

Is it possible to have a nightly build to include a unicode version of the embedded interpreter? That would save a lot of problems in getting some of the toolkits to work nicely with Houdini's python.

Thank you.

Best Regards,
Faizol

Hi all,

Since Fedora 11 default python version is 2.6, I have compiled python2.5 (defaulted to /usr/local folders) in order to compile wxPython and PyQt against it. Now that I have successfuly got all the files to compile correctly, I just realized from browsing the forum here, that Houdini only supports ansi version of the toolkit. Is there any documentation anywhere on how to disable unicode when compiling the two toolkits? Now every time the toolkit library is called, I'll encounter either PyUnicodeUCS2_AsLatin1String or PyUnicodeUCS2_FromEncodedObject from the library.

TIA, really really appreciate it.

Best Regards,
Faizol


EDIT: This is how I solved it, the source code has to be compiled with unicode=ucs2 flag. Also the wx version that has to be copied into houdini's python folder is the unicode version.

hi all,
there is a nice demo on VRay RT renderer (GPU based);

link: http://www.spot3d.com/vrayrt/gpu20090725.mov [spot3d.com]