Hi javi, nice to see with Houdini and 3D Light.
Well I have seen the Mauritius tutorial about H and 3DLight, and I have a couple of advices that complements his excelllent explanation.
To automate the render setup use presets.
Look at the little arrow button in the top part of the ROP parameters, close to the operator name, this button opens the presets menu, you can configure your RenderMan ROP to have the needed settings to work with 3D Light and save them.
I have attached a file with the presets needed to work with 3D Light, at least the minimum I have seen in the tutorial, I haven't use 3DLight never, only prman, so maybe something is missing but the idea is clear.
Uncompress and copy the rman.idx file in your:
$HOME/houdini8.8/presets/Driver
Create the needed directories in cas eyou need them.
Now open the button I told youe, you should be able to see at the bottom of the menu an entry with the name 3DLight, select it and look at your ROP parameters
Another option is to use a creation script to customize the RenderMan ROP creation to be automaticallly setup for 3DLight, is a good option is you are going to use 3DLight all the time, see the creation scripts help in the help browser here:
hdox
/houdini/content/commands/guide/hscript_events.html
And finally and the best solution following the actual houdini philosophy is to create an HDA and encapsulate it in an OTL that makes all the bells and whistles that you need.
Other interesting discussion maybe related to your problem:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=4613&highlight=air [
sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=4858&highlight=air [
sidefx.com]
Finally and advice is to try the AIR renderer, is quite good and comes with a complete Houdini integration. Is not free, but cheaper than prman:
http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/air.html [
sitexgraphics.com]
I told to Gonzalo Rueda one year ago about this render engine and he was very impressed about it.
It support implicit surfaces by default, for example Frantic films uses it to render their fluid simulations, I am sure this point will catch your attention
Ok I hope this helps Javi, if you need more help you know where I am.