Please read the blog post above for the motivation behind this. In the meantime there is not only the Cornell Box checked into the new Github repository, but other scenes as well:
I currently use PRMan (Pixar's RenderMan) and Redshift as external renderers. Others might be added later. Let me know if a scene for Houdini Indie works if only one of those external renderers is installed or if there are other problems with those scenes …
Maybe we would get a better solution by sending a MacBook Pro to Toronto. Once Mark Elendt got addicted to it a Mac port is just hours away … I'll go and talk to Steve … :twisted:
P.S.: Rick, say hello to the Mill NY crew. Good to see that there is Houdini interest now (beside you) …
I stopped having private desktop machines years ago because I spend too much time in front of a computer anyway during working hours. I had laptops now for at least 6-7 years and all of them had some sort of Linux system on it, but most of them were dual boot because I just love playing with a lot of renderers (and there are a lot).
Reallisticly there are not too many renderers which are really production ready for film work but PRMan (and RenderMan compliant renderers like AIR and 3Delight), mental ray, and Mantra I needed always on my laptop. Others (like Radiance, Maxwell, etc.) are nice to have and play around with (and learn from) it but over the years I had less and less time to do that in my spare time.
At The Mill I had a really nice setup (thanks to Dave Levy) where I had all the development tools (for Houdini, XSI, and Maya) synced on the laptop. So when I left the company I synced into one direction (to the laptop) and went home. If I changed stuff on there I synced the other direction (to the desktop machine) the next day and some softlinks made the transition between NFS (work) and local disk space seamless. I nearly convinced them (The Mill) to let me work from home (which in my opinion is Berlin, not London) and for a while I was allowed to do that (once every 4 to 6 weeks). That's where a nice setup and a laptop gets more significant …
Well I left London, didn't go back home (to Berlin) either, but came to the US to learn more about Houdini (which was kind of my hobby at The Mill) and to contribute my experience with several renderers at/to Digital Domain. My old laptop was dual boot (as I said before), Windows XP was untouched on the first internal hard drive, and Linux on the second internal drive. Unfortunately the heat produced by my Dell Inspiron 8200 made the second hard drive (Linux) head crash twice (in three years). Nice to have a backup on the desktop machines …
Now I'm not traveling a lot by airplane anymore. My work is 10 minutes by bicycle from home (now Santa Monica) and when I thought about buying a new computer I thought about a desktop machine (again). Maybe an Opteron? 64 bit? …
I finally decided to buy a MacBook Pro. Being tired of all this Linux distributions (which are nice but eat a lot of your spare time as well - I liked Gentoo BTW) and having to reboot just because you want to tests something on Win32 for a moment. At work I can do that via a hotkey (having two machines sharing one monitor, mouse and keyboard) and running Win32 and Linux all the time. But for home?
Well, a friend of mine works for Sony in SF on the new Playstation 3 and he showed me his laptop. OS X, Windows, and Linux on the same machine. He even cross-compiles for the cell chip on it. I just thought: F**k it, I'm going to buy one … and guess what:
The only thing I'm really missing is: Houdini !!!
I haven't tried the WIndows <-> Linux part on OS X yet (I have the laptop just one week now). But for rendering, shader writing, plugin development, etc. I'm fine right now. Does anybody have experience with running Houdini (via Windows or Linux) on the MacBook Pro? That would be soo nice to share …
Thanks, I dropped the emerge for now. I just install it the usual way …
But another question: Which kernel are you using?
I use:
> uname -a …2.6.8-gentoo-r3 …
I have no problems running Houdini 7.0.171 using The Mill's commercial license but I DO have problems to run the license server locally on the laptop and check out a non-commercial license. So, yes, no problems with the kernel or the gcc version (3.3.3) running the Houdini executables, but I can't use the local license server
I tried your ebuild and after downloading the files I got:
> emerge houdini-7.0.171.ebuild Calculating dependencies …done! >>> emerge (1 of 1) media-gfx/houdini-7.0.171 to / — No package manifest found: /usr/portage/media-gfx/houdini/Manifest !!! No package digest file found: /usr/portage/media-gfx/houdini/files/digest-houdini-7.0.171 !!! Type “ebuild foo.ebuild digest” to generate it.