Blind servant bows in awe

Thanks Mario

Wolfwood

peliosis
Oh come on, 17k is not much, 3ds max costs many times more after adding all the plugins and stuff, and still you're going to be pissed with the logo

Although I try to avoid software bashing and the like…that is the funniest thing I've read all week.

Software bashing? never!!!

Thanks Wolfwood!

Is there any affordable way to achieve gloss/frost effect in mantra?

This is a common error if you have your mantra rop incorrectly set up.
Check it out slowly once again, if your object, camera and light scope shows existing objects, if output and shadowmaps and whatever are set to correct paths, all sort of things.
Make it as simple as you can.
If you end up hopeless, sure of your innocence, restart houdini and reload the scene, it helped me once.

This occurs often and usually is caused by a basic human error.

This is strange, when you write: A=&(45)F^fF it seems like the turtle is going back to branch axiom before drawing fF and also fF is getting some different length.
Perhaps it's a bug but it can be some special behaviour of branches, it should be checked in other l-system constructors (like l-studio from www.algorithmicbotany.org).

I'll try to figure it out.

Oh come on, 17k is not much, 3ds max costs many times more after adding all the plugins and stuff, and still you're going to be pissed with the logo

More modules would certainly be good, but I like sidefx for it doesn't look for cgtalk thread records just do their work.

Ha! That bricker thing is bored with hearing my curses over and over.
I somewhat like that: “Aaaarghhh!!! not again!!!!” surge

Remember that unlimited mantra rendering licenses follows one master.
So it is not that expensive if you want a farm.

Oh 4 gb is great! You can construct a scene so UNoptimized that it can hardly move in the viewport and rendering takes lightyears

Just kidding, but houdini really slows down with “complex” scenes, I built a complicated l-system tree of around 300k only and after reading it from geo, I'm almost unable to use edit SOP on it, lattice works like a frog in tar, horrible. SESI should have a look at xsi (in such particular cases).

Sorry for this kind of OT

I had enough problems with every card and decided to buy quadro.
It's better to buy a slower quadro than a new blazing geforce along with 3 year troubles and endless driver changing guarantee.
Once I got the pro card, every display problem is gone.

Peter

Ha! Got that freaky bastard!

It WAS caused by some aberrations I introduced into polygons direction.
The normals were pointing ok, but the object shaded in opengl like inverted, and I there were some mess with facet/reverse/point(-$NX-$NY-$NZ)I've created while trying to reverse the inner surface correctly.

The reverse sop works strange, it doesn't really reverse normals. I'm not sure what it does? I had normals pointing in one direction and surface something like reversed back to them. Strange because now, after cleaning things up, normals are exactly the same but the blob renders ok.

Thank you so much guys for clearing it and thank you Mario for the shader,
It helped me a lot.

Can you tell something about the oddness I encountered with the normals?
I think sometimes houdini shows correct geometry eg. shells done with polyextrude with normals pointing out and all points welded, but it is not exactly what it looks like since after importing to xsi as obj, there are two objects instead of one?!
So this is my second proof. Should it be so easy to loose track of poly direction?

Peter Twardo

Yes, thats perfectly clear especially after observing glass things around.
Thanks for pointing it out.
So basically to get transparent shadows I need to modify surface alpha?
What is the difference between alpha and opacity in VEX output?

I have an irregular glass bubble, which has some thickness so there the ray crosses 4 surfaces to get through (with refraction index = 1)
No matter how I set up ior the rendering looks surreal and incorrect.

I used “busted wonky” vex glass, Mario Marengo glass (scene from cornell box diaries).
I was looking for a sample (to use and learn) of standard glass shader, which works ok and casts correct shadows.
Do you use vex prepared glass shaders or some compiled hard coded brainstorm thingies?

I'm comparing different renderers (mantra, mray, vray and air) and surprisingly, mantra seems to render my bubble faster than mr in xsi with proportional quality settings.

I can't find a decent glass shader for houdini, everyone produces some strange results like no transparent shadows, opaque image alpha in some large areas (like half of the object) no matter how high raydepth is set.
I's there anything like this floating around or should I just sit and learn vex and vops better to create my own “maybe working” after a month of sweating above it.
There should be more shaders and good shaders in the package, In most softwares making a basic glass means moving three sliders. I checked several shaders I was happy to find, but sometimes the vopnets are complicated and don't seem like can be corrected fast enough by no shader writing person.

Peter

On polygons it's slightly better, but still it seems like houdini snaps to some orientation AND edge, making it unusable to snap fast and conveniently. I have only geo edge snap selected.
I think it could be some bug.

Peter

They are open, and if they are close, the ends SOP has no effect
Check it out, snapping to edges is almost unusable for me (a pity because I really need it to work)

thanks

Peter

There are some problems with edge/curve snapping.
When set to geo edge snap only, Houdini snaps to some non existent objects or directions (orient on snap is disabled).
I tried every combination with no luck. This is horrible within a complex scene. I have 10 drawings imported (over 10 thousands of curves) and I'm unable to draw precisely.
Point snap works very good by the way.
This was tested in a very simple fresh 2 curve scene also.

I hope it's fixable somehow?

Thanks,

Peter Twardo

No problem with Z brush.
It's also worth mentioning that file operations (importing exporting refreshing) are second to none in houdini in terms of ergonomics.
You export via rop output, and import via file sop, you don't have to lookup files in some explorer, after setting it up all you have to do when you'd like to reexport refined geo is to hit a button, the same with import
No deleting no transforming no clicking to find it.
Sweet.

Ah that thing!

I used them before starting this thread. I olny hoped they can be more than one character long
There are not too much of them for a stubborn heavy l-system enforcer

Thanks a lot edward for answering this almost dead thread

Thanks, good or bad, I have to use it

MR is expensive as a standalone product, XSI foundation is 500$ with MR onboard.
It's a ready, full blown product with huge userbase and already present and developed features like accelerated ray tracing GI, SSS, great volume rendering etc. Features that user could just use without thinking how to trick them using pointclouds or whatever.
Perhaps it would be faster and more profitable to incorporate MR (developing mantra anyway) than using all the resources to recreate these features in mantra.
I am no technician nor am I interested in learning some hard core programming stuff. I'm interested in houdini because it's the most powerful software I've ever used and it doesn't force me to write some stupid scripts for achieving basic effects (unlike any other soft), on the other hand it's almost unusable for fast projects because rendering in it is just a tough time consuming task.
That said, instead of working in houdini, I still use max.

cheers

Peter