mabelzile
It's not yet supported when reloading packages, you have to restart Houdini for your changes to take effect.
Wouldn't "hou.ui.reloadPackage" method do that?
mabelzile
It's not yet supported when reloading packages, you have to restart Houdini for your changes to take effect.
No_ha
Sooo AWS just made (almost) all their products free, including Deadline.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/media/aws-thinkbox-products-now-available-free-of-charge/ [aws.amazon.com]
No usage-based costs for deadline clients anymore. So now the costs should only be for the actual servers. Hopefully, I can figure out the setup and report back if it works. Though their documentation seems more geared towards full-time network admins and not Houdini Indie users :S
shaned
What holds back artists, decision-makers, tools from using Houdini?
Comfort? Complexity? Price? No Adoption runway? Stubbornness?
No wrong answers here.
If you are uncomfortable with answering publically, you can email me directly: shaned@sidefx.com.
Thank community!
Cheers
AdrianoguilhermecasagrandiAdrianoguilhermecasagrandiAdrianoguilhermecasagrandiLuke Letellier
We have been contacting them through the forums repeatedly, but that hasn't done much good. I wasn't sure if any of the developers here knew what might be up on their development end of things.
I think that's not something for the sesi devs to comment, but rather, the community.
There are some tricks to make Deadline work with H19, just do a search on youtube.
I don't know if that will work if the aws services right now, but hopefully I'll get that answer in a couple of weeks.
Youtube search gives nothing. Where is that hack you talking about please?
EDIT: Never mind, just installing as 18.5 and pointing at the H19 pref folder works eventually.
There is a file in the database that you have to change. There were several YT videos on that, but the one that I've watched was banned due to piracy, although the DL videos wasn't about that.
1. AWS-Thinkbox are aware of the problem, but they can't comment.
2. Probably is due to changes on the houdini license server... that has messed up with UBL in the AWS services
3. They can't comment if they are working on a fix, but I believe eventually they will do It, and hopefully, sesi doesn't change the license server for some years...
Well, whatrever i've tried... it doesn't work. I can submit the renders, but they crash right away. Really annoying. Already almost April 2022 and those guys are still behind. They were slow before but since Amazon it's gotten even worse :$
It's easy to make It work, the real problem lies in the AWS services right now (with h19).
But I think they are slow too...
Attached the files needed to make It work with H19. Other then that, It should be problems related to your database.
Thanks a lot for that. What is that Houdini19.diff? Where should it be placed please?
Cheers,
AdrianoguilhermecasagrandiAdrianoguilhermecasagrandiLuke Letellier
We have been contacting them through the forums repeatedly, but that hasn't done much good. I wasn't sure if any of the developers here knew what might be up on their development end of things.
I think that's not something for the sesi devs to comment, but rather, the community.
There are some tricks to make Deadline work with H19, just do a search on youtube.
I don't know if that will work if the aws services right now, but hopefully I'll get that answer in a couple of weeks.
Youtube search gives nothing. Where is that hack you talking about please?
EDIT: Never mind, just installing as 18.5 and pointing at the H19 pref folder works eventually.
There is a file in the database that you have to change. There were several YT videos on that, but the one that I've watched was banned due to piracy, although the DL videos wasn't about that.
1. AWS-Thinkbox are aware of the problem, but they can't comment.
2. Probably is due to changes on the houdini license server... that has messed up with UBL in the AWS services
3. They can't comment if they are working on a fix, but I believe eventually they will do It, and hopefully, sesi doesn't change the license server for some years...
Well, whatrever i've tried... it doesn't work. I can submit the renders, but they crash right away. Really annoying. Already almost April 2022 and those guys are still behind. They were slow before but since Amazon it's gotten even worse :$
AdrianoguilhermecasagrandiLuke Letellier
We have been contacting them through the forums repeatedly, but that hasn't done much good. I wasn't sure if any of the developers here knew what might be up on their development end of things.
I think that's not something for the sesi devs to comment, but rather, the community.
There are some tricks to make Deadline work with H19, just do a search on youtube.
I don't know if that will work if the aws services right now, but hopefully I'll get that answer in a couple of weeks.
Youtube search gives nothing. Where is that hack you talking about please?
EDIT: Never mind, just installing as 18.5 and pointing at the H19 pref folder works eventually.
vinyvince
Another case
briansd3zd3z
Any idea on where string primvar support is in the XPU roadmap?
The answer to this is more complicated than it might appear.
What you're asking for in essence is not just "when will string primvar support be working in XPU", but actually "when can we have something within a shader trigger the loading of a texture".
That kind of feature is called "on-demand texture loading".
We're looking into this, but it's actually a very large job (given the disconnect of the GPU from the CPU) so will not happen overnight. So perhaps somewhere between 6months -> 1year. But I cannot be certain sorry.
Thanks for the inquiry though.
Its useful to hear that people are attempting this kind of thing
Cheers
Luke Letellier
We have been contacting them through the forums repeatedly, but that hasn't done much good. I wasn't sure if any of the developers here knew what might be up on their development end of things.
BrianHankeguilhermecasagrandi
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.Image Not Found
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!
BrianHankeguilhermecasagrandi
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.