Great, thanks for the info Heileif

jsmack

Heileif
Hello

Thank you for the reply!

I'm using Windows to.

I tried using ip adress and writing 'localhost' after your reply.

Localhost gets converted to the computer name :/ But now i get a message about Karma license will expire soon, so progress i guess.

From my understanding of Husk is that it should work without license, and only needing license from the render engine beeing used. But maybe i'm wrong?

All the houdini tools require a connection to the license server with valid licenses present. Husk or mplay and the like do not 'check out' a license to work.

Hello jsmack, that means that husk just need a valid license server online?
If at the moment I kick the render there are no more hbatch licenses available it will start the render?
Thanks

Thanks!

Good to know, I though I was getting mad.
Also, would be good to have a global icon scale parameter in case is not there, I know there is one per module, but I believe
I haven't seen anything global that affects all modules.
Also would be useful and less confusing if the global scale of the rig can be initiated to more or less fit the dimension of the geo to have some good initial values.
Cheers.

P

Ah I found how to change the icon scale size, the Size parameter in the autorig panel, too obvious for not being expose somewhere.
But he other one, the overall scale of the rig still is a mistery

Ah I found how to change the icon scale size, the Size parameter in the autorig panel, too obvious for not being expose somewhere.
But he other one, the overall scale of the rig still is a mistery

Hello.
Probably this questions sounds a little bit lame but I couldn't find how to do this easily with the new autorig tools in 16.
Well, to be honest I haven't used the autorig stuff since a couple of years ago, I rememeber previous version used to get a decent default scale depending on your geo, and you can scale the whole rig controls easiliy from the root.
But in 16 all the scale parameters are locked and the initial scale of the rig controls are far from match my geometry, in my case they are like 3 times smaller than my character, so I have to unlock the Uniform Scale parameter adjust it to make the controls fit my geo.
Why are all the scale parameters for the root locked?

The second thing, would be possible to expose the Display Scale in the autorig panel so we can easily adjust the scale preview for the controls?

Thanks

P

Wow really cool!
Really good job.

Hey Kormy, is difficult to not start blaming about these software war topics.
But following you logic, looking at all the usability, modelling and animation updates in Houdini, and having an idea of what is coming in 14.5 and 15, well I will be more afraid on the Autodesk side.
Houdini has a lot of weak areas, but at the speed Side FX is trying to improve the software is way faster an aggressive than Autodesk.
And Houdini has something that no one of the Autodesk products have: a great design and solid rocks foundations from the core of the software, is not a collection of patches.
So, in the long term I think Houdini is going to keep growing, I don't think Max or Maya is going to steal some of its user base.

The Storm is coming …..

Netvudu
Well, don´t get me wrong, Mark. I appreciate both your explanation and the packed geometry feature, but…seriously, no matter how I look at it, it looks as bad planning.
I mean…how long, after you guys told us how cool packed geo is and how well it works for dynamics, you were expecting for us to try to actually render those dynamics?
The very first thing anybody is going to try is to shatter something, pack it, and sim it.
And then bamf! it doesn´t render properly, because you lost your inside and outside group…not very logical, is it?
Or maybe, we are supposed to unpack every time before render. Which I can live with, but I would expect someone to confirm it if that´s what I gotta do.

Mmmm not trying to defend Mark here but, usually before shattering and simming you have the look dev done, or at least the shaders assignments, which are saved in shop_materialpath. An attributes are kept in packed primitives. So what I can see is, more than a problem in packed primitives (ans there are issues indeed), is more a workflow issue.
Is kind of the same situation as when you use polysoups.

Constantin X
If one finds out Houdini to be so much different that it can't use it in first hour, it's a dead duck.

The dead luck seems to be moving a lot
Honestly here I cant agree with you, I dont how many tools you master or years of experience.
Our scenes cant open in Maya just because of the amount of objects/nodes.
The outliner collapse.
Thanks god we have Houdini and a network editor. So yes we use pretty complex scenes and we use the network editor and we are very happy with it and save our day in every show.
Is different, yep, do you have to make the same mistakes that Maya/SI/MAX/LW has done in the past? NOT.
By user friendly you mean user convention. Yes there is convention to have hirarchical trees to manage a scene.
Is this the only way or the best way, it depends.
For complex scenes definitely not always.
So if you expect Houdini to work in the same way as SI or Maya, well in some areas is similar in other is trying to adapt workflows to make things easier for new people.
But certain areas of the tool are the flagships, is what makes a difference. Managing scenes from a network editor is one of this areas, so if you find this too different or disruptive for your work and you feel you dont have the time or is not worth to try, probably it is better to use a more conventional tool like Maya.
It depends of your priorities.
But please dont make assumptions and be so categoric with statements like Houdini scene management sucks because there are people in this forum with a little bit of experience also and probably they have a different opinion
Play nice, I am not shouting.

Constantin X
For example i want to animate the nodes visibility, so i will group them under a null and animate the null visibility, while maintaining the items animations untouched. And this is just a simple trick witch i do so often in my scenes, but there are many more, so again, try to figure it out from the video.

I think I understand now what Constantin is looking for.
About doing everything in the tree view or the network editor, well it could be a matter of what you prefer, a well organized network is better than an outliner, spacially for massive scenes.
But about setting something in a subnet and then inherit it to the nodes below, I have to say that is something that many people could miss.
Hirarchies in Houdini and other packages are different, with its good and bad points. One of the reasons becasue Alembic was invented.
So yes, I understand that he misses these way of working because it makes some workflows easier. On the other hand makes scene processing quite slow.
There are workarounds and at the end of the day is not a big deal, but this is probably one of the things that confuses new users a lot.

l3g3nd
At work we have 2 machines allocated for Ifd-gen.
All our fx scenes are setup with delayed load so Ifd_gen is stupid fast.
We run 24 Ifd jobs simultaneously per box (24 cores). Then mantra picks up on the farm boxes to render the Ifd files.

The only exception is if we use a volume light which requires the volume to be in the scene sigh. So we lock that 1 job to the whole machine since it can chew up ram to write the Ifd for high res pyro Sims..

This is a nice setup for a small shop.

eetu
It's just a monetization choice, after all. If hbatch licenses were free, mantra licenses probably would not be.

I think the current price is all right, in theory you should have much less licenses of hbatch then mantra licenses.
Or actually for a small sutdio you can even have no batch licenses at all.
I have worked in commercials with this scheme with no problems.
Just a couple of escape licenses and one master.

sekow
I am preaching that kind of workflow for some time now. But with Soft or Maya you get practically unlimited batch licenses for sending data via sitoa/mtoa.
There is no argument against that.

Deathline works in the way I meantioned, it can kick render from IFD ans sent them to Mantra, it is very easy to use and lots of advertising companies use it.
I have actually used it in commercials.
For the batch licenses in Maya and Soft, I am not sure, but in maya I think you can only kick render it is a different concept as a batch license in houdini.
I am probably wrong here, but I rememebr that to kick simulations we needed to buy more licenses, but I am not sure again.
A batch license in Houdini can do everything, can computa any output even if it is a scene that is using nodes that requires a Master license.
The Mantra node can create IFDs just settign a toggle. then tools like Deathline can use sequences of IFDs file to render from Mantra at no extra cost.

Constantin X
Well, so far works exactly as in autodesk

Jaja, sorry I can't resist this one, man you don't have a clue how is the support from Autodesk.

Sorry, not trying to defend SESI here, but I think your problem is not a pricing issue it is just not using the correct pipeline.
Arnold has ass files, like prman ribs or mantra's ifd, for a very good reason.
No matter how “user friendly” is sending a render from the scene it is really inefficient and a bad way of working.
The sooner you have a setup in your farm to kick renders from ass files the better.

And you will fix two problems

riviera
There are strong preconceptions against Houdini in the character/rigging field, but all the tools (and more) are there, and my opinion is that much more capable rigs could be done than in Maya. (Just never had the incentive to spend my free time on rigging, of all things )

So I for one am pretty interested on how things go…

Yep in terms of architecture houdini offers lots of possibilites for rigging but the IK Solver in CHOPs and the transform stack in OBJ context needs some love.
CHOPs needs to be updated for the 21st century, the concept is amazing the implementation is old and needs to be correctly integrated with character animation.
The transform stack in OBJ is slow specially when you have lots of nested subnets, this doesnt affects character animation too much but affects vehicle rigs.

My hopes for character animation is that SESI rewrite CHOPS for H14.

phrenzy84
Allow me a stable way to paint weights on wire captures. That would be heaven.

Very true, I wonder if the problems with some of the viewport states are due to the internals issues with the current viewport architecture.