This came out today:
http://www.3dlabs.com/whatsnew/pressreleases/pr02/02-10-22-acuity.htm [3dlabs.com]
“Prototype OpenGL 2.0 Drivers Available for Wildcat VP560
As part of its ongoing commitment to developing and supporting open standards for high level shading programmability, 3Dlabs is making its prototype OpenGL 2.0 drivers prototype available to qualified ISVs (independent software vendors) on the Wildcat VP560 – making it one of the most cost-effective OpenGL 2.0 evaluation and development platforms. Available now for all Wildcat VP accelerators, OpenGL 2.0 enables software vendors take advantage of the full programmability of the Wildcat VP family to develop applications that extend the boundaries of interactive realism.
If you are an ISV and are interested in exploring the possibilities of OpenGL 2.0, please contact 3Dlabs at ogl2@3dlabs.com
More detailed information on the 3Dlabs Acuity driver suite can be found at www.3dlabs.com/acuity. ”
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Technical Discussion » Cg fragment/vertex shaders in Houdini
- craiglhoffman
- 252 posts
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Technical Discussion » Cg fragment/vertex shaders in Houdini
- craiglhoffman
- 252 posts
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From what I read ATI/3dlabs are pretty far ahead with OpenGL 2.0 and it's development tools and it is gaining more acceptance than Cg, but NVidia does have a huge market share… But in CAD and Feature Film work there are a lot of ATI and 3dLabs cards out there, so I would think that most high end Animation packages out there are going to go for OpenGL 2.0 which should run on every card.
Anyway, I wrote to someone at Side Effects a couple weeks ago on this topic and he said they were waiting for card manufacturers to start releasing their OpenGL 2.0 drivers and that it would be feasible for them to release a version of Houdini where you can simply point to an Open GL 2.0 shader and have it render on the hardware on your screen.
I own a Wildcat VP 990 Pro, and I pointed him to the new OpenGL 2.0 Beta drivers for it and he thanked me and passed it on to the developers.
Now, I don't know what it take for Houdini to support OpenGL 2.0 with VOPs, but that would be a dream come true! Perhaps there can be standard VOPS that are “OGL 2.0 friendly” so you can make shaders that work in hardware and software. I can't imagine that al the VOPs would work…
I played with some of the OpenGL 2.0 demos for my Wildcat, and they were pretty neat. The most impressive was the real time bump mapping. That kicked butt! I was a little surprised that it seemed to tesselate the geometry into “facets” that were easily seen. I expected it to do it at a pixel level, but that might be too much for the hardware to handle, perhaps. I tried upping the hardware anti-aliasing, but this did nothing but totally screw up my Houdini session when I brought it back up. For some reason Houdini only likes the standard anti-aliasing on the Wildcat VP for now. (That goes along with the other quirks with using Houdini on the Wildcat and waiting for a driver update to fix the bugs….)
Anyway, I can't wait to use hardware rendering. Even if it is for test renders… I was thinking of selling my Wildcat VP to get an NVidia QuadroFX card, but with the Wildcat having early OpenGL 2.0 drivers, I am going to stick with it now.
Cheers,
Craig
Anyway, I wrote to someone at Side Effects a couple weeks ago on this topic and he said they were waiting for card manufacturers to start releasing their OpenGL 2.0 drivers and that it would be feasible for them to release a version of Houdini where you can simply point to an Open GL 2.0 shader and have it render on the hardware on your screen.
I own a Wildcat VP 990 Pro, and I pointed him to the new OpenGL 2.0 Beta drivers for it and he thanked me and passed it on to the developers.
Now, I don't know what it take for Houdini to support OpenGL 2.0 with VOPs, but that would be a dream come true! Perhaps there can be standard VOPS that are “OGL 2.0 friendly” so you can make shaders that work in hardware and software. I can't imagine that al the VOPs would work…
I played with some of the OpenGL 2.0 demos for my Wildcat, and they were pretty neat. The most impressive was the real time bump mapping. That kicked butt! I was a little surprised that it seemed to tesselate the geometry into “facets” that were easily seen. I expected it to do it at a pixel level, but that might be too much for the hardware to handle, perhaps. I tried upping the hardware anti-aliasing, but this did nothing but totally screw up my Houdini session when I brought it back up. For some reason Houdini only likes the standard anti-aliasing on the Wildcat VP for now. (That goes along with the other quirks with using Houdini on the Wildcat and waiting for a driver update to fix the bugs….)
Anyway, I can't wait to use hardware rendering. Even if it is for test renders… I was thinking of selling my Wildcat VP to get an NVidia QuadroFX card, but with the Wildcat having early OpenGL 2.0 drivers, I am going to stick with it now.
Cheers,
Craig
Technical Discussion » Fog COP and Z-Depth images issues
- craiglhoffman
- 252 posts
- Offline
If the COP says specifically Z format, then it probably will take what Houdini writes out in Zdepth format. Perhaps you need to name it .rat to support the floating point type of Z file… Not sure.
Anyway, I just jumped in because I had some experience with this with Shake which doesn't support Z format renders from Renderman or Houdini, but rather a render from a standard Depth shader which is different (and just uses color to show depth rather than keep it in a higher precision floating point format like Houdini).
Anyway, Houdini's COPs may be different, so I don't want to be any more misleading if I am wrong.
You can view Z format images in mplay with a button somewhere that toggles mplay to view the full range or something like that…
Good luck,
Craig
Anyway, I just jumped in because I had some experience with this with Shake which doesn't support Z format renders from Renderman or Houdini, but rather a render from a standard Depth shader which is different (and just uses color to show depth rather than keep it in a higher precision floating point format like Houdini).
Anyway, Houdini's COPs may be different, so I don't want to be any more misleading if I am wrong.
You can view Z format images in mplay with a button somewhere that toggles mplay to view the full range or something like that…
Good luck,
Craig
Technical Discussion » Fog COP and Z-Depth images issues
- craiglhoffman
- 252 posts
- Offline
I am not sure, but the Z image that the COP wants may be just a simple white to black image.
The Z depth image that mantra writes out for shadow mapping, etc. is a different format that holds a lot more information.
Try just rendering a depth image tif file that varies from white to black with one color meaning close, the other meaning far and use that in the COP.
I have had to do this in other compositors, but I am not sure what COPs does or needs since I have never used it.
-Craig
The Z depth image that mantra writes out for shadow mapping, etc. is a different format that holds a lot more information.
Try just rendering a depth image tif file that varies from white to black with one color meaning close, the other meaning far and use that in the COP.
I have had to do this in other compositors, but I am not sure what COPs does or needs since I have never used it.
-Craig
Technical Discussion » DVD creation in Houdini
- craiglhoffman
- 252 posts
- Offline
And there is software to allow frameserving between software. For example if you don't want to use ULead Media Studio Pro's MPEG2 encoder, you can frameserve to TMPGEnc. It seems that perhaps Houdini could take advantage of this somehow…
-Craig
-Craig
Technical Discussion » License problem
- craiglhoffman
- 252 posts
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I just wrote the same question to support and they said the server is down due to the big blackout.
Keep trying.
-Craig
Keep trying.
-Craig
Technical Discussion » Surface Thickness node?
- craiglhoffman
- 252 posts
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I am not sure what you mean by “Surface thickness node”.
If you want your shader to be passed some information that you set up as meaning thickness of the surface for your shader to do Subsurface scattering calculations, then make it a surface attribute.
You can create color attributes on your surface (using the Point SOP or the Paint SOP, etc.) and then copy them to a “SurfThickness” Attribute created with an Attribute SOP.
Then make sure your surface shader uses the “SurfThickness” attribute at render time.
Does this help?
-Craig
If you want your shader to be passed some information that you set up as meaning thickness of the surface for your shader to do Subsurface scattering calculations, then make it a surface attribute.
You can create color attributes on your surface (using the Point SOP or the Paint SOP, etc.) and then copy them to a “SurfThickness” Attribute created with an Attribute SOP.
Then make sure your surface shader uses the “SurfThickness” attribute at render time.
Does this help?
-Craig
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