BrianHanke

guilhermecasagrandi
Brian sorry to bother you again, but I was using the AWS Pricing Calculator and I found It far more expensive that I thought It would be. What kind of machine are you using in Azure? Do you use them as reserved machines or on Demand?

Here's my go-to Azure setup, just under $1/hour plus a few cents for bandwidth and storage. The key is using a spot instance. Not sure what it's called on AWS, just means that you can be kicked out if the system needs the capacity for people paying full price. In my experience all cloud providers offer pretty similar services and pricing.

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BrianHanke
Glad it's working. Let us know how it goes on AWS!

frostfx
hi, sorry to dig up an old post but having a hard time figuring out whats the best way to prune agents out of a moving alembic camera frustrum now as the prune lop has had an update.

im using the autocollection %bound on the primitive pattern of the prune lop:
/crowd/agent* - %bound(/cam/Cam_mainShape, dolly=2)
it works but does not force an update as the camera moves.

reading up on the prune parameter field - The Prune LOP now evaluates the Prune parameter separately for each primitive that will be modified, allowing the use of local variables to access information about each primitive to decide how it will be modified.

Putting a random timevarying expression in the field like min(@Frame, 1) works but what could be a better(intended) solution in this case?

BrianHanke
Just checked. hython hangs if I'm not logged in, but if I log in with my script it works fine. RHEL 8.4 on Azure. Did you run sesictrl login and hserver -S blahblahblah?

BrianHanke
Here's the script I use on Linux VMs:

sesictrl login (will prompt for user/pass)
wait
cd /home/brian/programs/houdini/
source houdini_setup
hserver
hserver -S https://www.sidefx.com/license/sesinetd

BrianHanke
Yeah my impression is that Thinkbox UBL is VERY expensive. You pay for convenience. An Arnold license is $45 for a month, that's 720 hours. 1000 hours UBL for Arnold is $660. I don't get it... But, I shouldn't comment too much on what happens when you try to scale Azure up with lots of VMs and licenses since I haven't done it. In theory it works!

BrianHanke
I'm using Houdini Indie. The included 3 (4?) Karma licenses are plenty for the stuff I do.

If I wanted to scale up for a big project I would get monthly rentals of whatever renderer I was using. I did a mini version of this with Clarisse, renting a CNode for a month. They use old school activation licensing so that almost led to disaster when the VM I had it installed on randomly failed. Isotropix was nice to me and issued a new hardware ID, but that's why I prefer login!

BrianHanke

guilhermecasagrandi
How did you manage the houdini licenses?

I use login licensing. It's a lifesaver for stuff like this. I have a script that makes sure everything is tidy before starting rendering: sesictrl login, then setup Houdini's paths and variables and such. (Old school license server style like Clarisse works too, but you're playing with fire if anything happens to the VM.)

guilhermecasagrandi
Is Azure cheaper than aws? Do you think running on aws by deadline would be easier to manage the ongoing renders?

I think AWS, Azure and Google Cloud are all around the same price. They all have different VMs, Google has more cores on some, Azure is lacking GPU options, but in the end the processing power costs about the same.

AWS and Deadline isn't easier for me since I do not understand Deadline AT ALL. Custom scripting and controlling renders via SSH makes more sense to me somehow. But, for big jobs I guess you'd have to use something like Deadline to keep organized...

BrianHanke
Good luck, let us know what you end up doing! For some reason I find AWS very hard to use, but that might be just me...

rafal
Indeed. The MaterialX standard indicates that string inputs must be uniform.

Attributes for NodeDef Input elements:
- uniform (boolean, optional): if set to "true", then this input can only take uniform values and may not be connected to the outputs of other nodes. uniform must be set to true for string and filename-type inputs.

So for now the MaterialX shader VOPs don't provide an input for string parameters.

That's something we will need to revisit in the future.

robp_sidefx
Here's a custom light shader which supports projection. It's based off of our vanilla Karma light shader but adds projection via a "slide" parm. You can have a look at the vfl in a text editor if you want. Just search for "slide" or "defaultlightsurface1/projection" to see the additional block of code. Everything else is the original defaultlightsurface.

There's an RFE to add projection support to the vanilla Karma light shader, but we're also watching&waiting a bit to see how light shader&filter networks evolve with USD.

- Rob

oliver7
on my end, it happend when i had py2 packages installed (specifically aelib).. once removed.. everything was fine.

mattw
Hi,

Can you try todays build of 19.0? There was a bug in 19.0.426 that was causing issues and resulted in us marking the build as bad.

Cheers,
Matt

papsphilip
I had the same problem with ffmpeg. The Frame List needed to be in my working directory. That fixed it for me

mabelzile
Thanks, I found the problem.