The SOP Spreadsheet reminds me of the CHOP “Extended Information” .
One thing which is kinda annoying is the Extended Info window is not live. If you change parameters, the data in the window does not update. This is unlike the SOP Spreadsheet which does update. It makes the Extended Info window fairly useless (there's little point leaving it around).
At the least, perhaps the window could have an “update” button. That might be better for performance. At the moment you have to repeatedly reselect Extended Info from the CHOP RMB Menu for it to update. IMHO it's probably better to have it automatically update.
RFE: Make the data in the CHOP Extended Information Window keep up to date.
cheers,
ben.
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Technical Discussion » RFEs: Geometry Spreadsheet
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Technical Discussion » Rethinking Takes: Part 1 - The Take List
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hey, nice one.
So, to summarise the “take drawback” another way - it's annoying to have to explicitly conjoin all the possible combinations (model+move+shading) into one selectable take.
Here's an idea: what if you could select multiple takes!? yes yes hold on! It's not as craazy as it sounds. The take interface would still be a tree, maybe like this:
hip
Model:
English
French
* Albertan
Move:
* Hop
Skip
Jump
Shade:
Pastel
* Earthy
let's call these mid level nodes: Take Switches.
You could then make independent choices for each of the three. Hmmm. Perhaps it's last night's drinks with the friendly DD-Folk clouden me thinken, but it seems the only problem would be if two sub-takes had conflicting values - one would have to win. (?) Maybe we could just say the last one wins (from top to bottom through the list).
Ah! But would there be conflicts? What if we took clever-wolfwood's idea about scoping (nb. his follow-up post on auto-takes) and applied scopes to the Take Switches (Model, Move, Shade). That might solve that, quite simply.
Perhaps the rule would be Take Switches must have a scope. And perhaps sibling switches cannot have overlapping scope.
cheers,
ben.
So, to summarise the “take drawback” another way - it's annoying to have to explicitly conjoin all the possible combinations (model+move+shading) into one selectable take.
Here's an idea: what if you could select multiple takes!? yes yes hold on! It's not as craazy as it sounds. The take interface would still be a tree, maybe like this:
hip
Model:
English
French
* Albertan
Move:
* Hop
Skip
Jump
Shade:
Pastel
* Earthy
let's call these mid level nodes: Take Switches.
You could then make independent choices for each of the three. Hmmm. Perhaps it's last night's drinks with the friendly DD-Folk clouden me thinken, but it seems the only problem would be if two sub-takes had conflicting values - one would have to win. (?) Maybe we could just say the last one wins (from top to bottom through the list).
Ah! But would there be conflicts? What if we took clever-wolfwood's idea about scoping (nb. his follow-up post on auto-takes) and applied scopes to the Take Switches (Model, Move, Shade). That might solve that, quite simply.
Perhaps the rule would be Take Switches must have a scope. And perhaps sibling switches cannot have overlapping scope.
cheers,
ben.
Technical Discussion » Why do I have such a problem re-selecting with and edit SOP?
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Yep - “me too”.
I've experienced this a lot, for many versions of Houdini, and always thought it was from going back and forth between “doing stuff” in the Viewport and then “doing other stuff” in the (old skool) Network View.
Drives me crazy. I liked Houdini before it had these transient states (in the old days every operation was “atomic”, you didn't ever get into this “half done” mode where you had to click RMB to complete, or whatever).
It happens with a plain mouse.
I've even had cases where hitting “s” won't put me into transform/select mode. No, it's not CAPS LOCK. And hitting ESC is kinda scarey because i'm not sure i'll be able to get back to selecting geometry, even by pressing back-tick. Err? Press Enter. Oh dear. Where am I up to?
I don't think this is a secure selection problem - this is about pressing RMB and nothing happening, despite the geom being selected. It's hard to reproduce alright, but it seems like other people are saying they're seeing it too.
Phew. That rant's been stored up a long long time. I thought it was just me. Heh. Maybe it is.
cheers,
ben.
I've experienced this a lot, for many versions of Houdini, and always thought it was from going back and forth between “doing stuff” in the Viewport and then “doing other stuff” in the (old skool) Network View.
Drives me crazy. I liked Houdini before it had these transient states (in the old days every operation was “atomic”, you didn't ever get into this “half done” mode where you had to click RMB to complete, or whatever).
It happens with a plain mouse.
I've even had cases where hitting “s” won't put me into transform/select mode. No, it's not CAPS LOCK. And hitting ESC is kinda scarey because i'm not sure i'll be able to get back to selecting geometry, even by pressing back-tick. Err? Press Enter. Oh dear. Where am I up to?
I don't think this is a secure selection problem - this is about pressing RMB and nothing happening, despite the geom being selected. It's hard to reproduce alright, but it seems like other people are saying they're seeing it too.
Phew. That rant's been stored up a long long time. I thought it was just me. Heh. Maybe it is.
cheers,
ben.
Technical Discussion » Color Cop difference: colour swatch browser & cop viewpo
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hey,
I thought this was kinda funny.
I'm running Houdini on two monitors whose colours tend to drift from alignment. The left monitor has the Houdini Network panes, etc, and the right has a large viewport. I placed a COLOR COP down on the left hand monitor, and clicked on the colour browser. I noticed the colour in the COP Viewport on the right-hand screen looked quite different. Damn Monitors. Then, I dragged the colour browser over to the right-hand monitor, on top of the viewport. Uh? Now they're on the same monitor and they're still different. ah. yep… okay.
The colours are generated by different processes, sure, but I didn't expect the difference to be so marked. I guess there's a viewport (gamma?) display setting somewhere which might correct them. I set my “xgamma” to 1, and the viewport gamma control to 1, and they still looked different.
Still, gamma's not going to help much if the pixels are different values. I ran “xv” on the two oranges in the screen grab attached. Middle mouse interactively displays pixel values. For the attached image it says:
The COP Viewport HSV is (14,99,100) RGB is (255,64,1)
Colour Browser swatch HSV is (32,100,100) RGB is (255,136,0)
It's not a big deal. Hell, my monitors can vary this much :-)
Caveat enter!
cheers,
ben.
I thought this was kinda funny.
I'm running Houdini on two monitors whose colours tend to drift from alignment. The left monitor has the Houdini Network panes, etc, and the right has a large viewport. I placed a COLOR COP down on the left hand monitor, and clicked on the colour browser. I noticed the colour in the COP Viewport on the right-hand screen looked quite different. Damn Monitors. Then, I dragged the colour browser over to the right-hand monitor, on top of the viewport. Uh? Now they're on the same monitor and they're still different. ah. yep… okay.
The colours are generated by different processes, sure, but I didn't expect the difference to be so marked. I guess there's a viewport (gamma?) display setting somewhere which might correct them. I set my “xgamma” to 1, and the viewport gamma control to 1, and they still looked different.
Still, gamma's not going to help much if the pixels are different values. I ran “xv” on the two oranges in the screen grab attached. Middle mouse interactively displays pixel values. For the attached image it says:
The COP Viewport HSV is (14,99,100) RGB is (255,64,1)
Colour Browser swatch HSV is (32,100,100) RGB is (255,136,0)
It's not a big deal. Hell, my monitors can vary this much :-)
Caveat enter!
cheers,
ben.
Technical Discussion » Sequential filenames with spaces
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hi John,
Same config: (Gentoo) Linux + Houdini 8.0.383
It works for me?! I copied two images to /tmp, naming them ‘thing 001.jpg’ and ‘thing 002.jpg’. After first trying a bunch of smarty stuff with lots of double backslashes before the space character (etc) i just ended up with something which works, lo: '/tmp/thing $F3.jpg'.
I quit Houdini, started again, and just typed in the latter expression, and it simply worked. I have a COP Viewer Pane open. Could it be a cooking problem?
Something (v8?) new: I also noticed the text entered on the FILE COP filename param line changes colour as you edit it (live parsing? whoa).
cheers,
bibm bahb.
Same config: (Gentoo) Linux + Houdini 8.0.383
It works for me?! I copied two images to /tmp, naming them ‘thing 001.jpg’ and ‘thing 002.jpg’. After first trying a bunch of smarty stuff with lots of double backslashes before the space character (etc) i just ended up with something which works, lo: '/tmp/thing $F3.jpg'.
I quit Houdini, started again, and just typed in the latter expression, and it simply worked. I have a COP Viewer Pane open. Could it be a cooking problem?
Something (v8?) new: I also noticed the text entered on the FILE COP filename param line changes colour as you edit it (live parsing? whoa).
cheers,
bibm bahb.
Houdini Lounge » Forum posts lose New status
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
yes. and the clock is wrong. posted dates are way off (into the future). fast by 12 hours it appears.
Technical Discussion » crashing on save and quit
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
I think wolfwood means you should try: quit Houdini, rename your $HOME/houdini8.0 directory (eg. name it $HOME/houdini8.0_old1) and then restart Houdini, repeat what you did and see if the problem goes away.
Another thought is that you're running out of memory, and Houdini only realises this at the moment it tries to save! Let's call this Theory-B ™. :-)
Take a look at the Houdini Textport commands: memory and sopcache.
Also:
/ -> help -k cache
compfree geocache objcache opupdate sopcache texcache viewwrite
compopts imgdispopt
These might be worth exploring. The idea is to free up cached memory before risking a fatal save. Of course, this is assuming it's a memory issue.
cheers,
ben.
Another thought is that you're running out of memory, and Houdini only realises this at the moment it tries to save! Let's call this Theory-B ™. :-)
Take a look at the Houdini Textport commands: memory and sopcache.
Also:
/ -> help -k cache
compfree geocache objcache opupdate sopcache texcache viewwrite
compopts imgdispopt
These might be worth exploring. The idea is to free up cached memory before risking a fatal save. Of course, this is assuming it's a memory issue.
cheers,
ben.
Technical Discussion » rand()
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hey,
These days I tend to prefer to use a NOISE CHOP. I particularly like to add Brownian Noise to object transforms (well, ok, sometimes). The cute thing with chops, of course, is you can easily graph them in the Viewport. Unlike expressions sturb() etc you can see what it's going to do, and interactively mess with it a bit first.
Say your noise chop was called noise1, then you could replace the noise() in your expression with soemthing like: chop(“/ch/ch1/noise1/chan1”)
just thought i'd mention this alternative.
cheers,
ben.
These days I tend to prefer to use a NOISE CHOP. I particularly like to add Brownian Noise to object transforms (well, ok, sometimes). The cute thing with chops, of course, is you can easily graph them in the Viewport. Unlike expressions sturb() etc you can see what it's going to do, and interactively mess with it a bit first.
Say your noise chop was called noise1, then you could replace the noise() in your expression with soemthing like: chop(“/ch/ch1/noise1/chan1”)
just thought i'd mention this alternative.
cheers,
ben.
Technical Discussion » frame object in a viewport
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
SimonSpace_bar + “g” works for me.
Try “F” for frame
or “H” for home
Though, somedays, if I want to super turbo framing I hold down space and shift and f and g and h, and press really hard. :wink:
To see the Safe Area guides, press space+d and there's a “safe area” button down the bottom of the Guides & Markers panel.
cheers,
ben.
Technical Discussion » how can i fake string array??
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
haha!
How about a 2 dimensional string array! Let's seperate dim's with a “_”.
/ -> set test_10_20 = hello
/ -> echo $test_10_20
hello
/ -> set a=10
/ -> set b=20
/ -> echo ${test_${a}_${b}}
hello
/ -> set b=21
/ -> echo ${test_${a}_${b}}
/ -> set test_10_21 = world
/ -> echo ${test_${a}_${b}}
world
/ -> set test_${a}_${b} = “brave new world”
/ -> echo ${test_${a}_${b}}
brave new world
/ ->
and now let's list what we've got:
foreach word ( `run(“set”)` )
if( `index($word, “test_”)` != -1)
set $word
endif
end
which produces:
How about a 2 dimensional string array! Let's seperate dim's with a “_”.
/ -> set test_10_20 = hello
/ -> echo $test_10_20
hello
/ -> set a=10
/ -> set b=20
/ -> echo ${test_${a}_${b}}
hello
/ -> set b=21
/ -> echo ${test_${a}_${b}}
/ -> set test_10_21 = world
/ -> echo ${test_${a}_${b}}
world
/ -> set test_${a}_${b} = “brave new world”
/ -> echo ${test_${a}_${b}}
brave new world
/ ->
and now let's list what we've got:
foreach word ( `run(“set”)` )
if( `index($word, “test_”)` != -1)
set $word
endif
end
which produces:
- test_10_20 = hello
test_10_21 = brave new world
Take care - if you set a bunch of strings and save your session (to a .hip file) then the strings will be saved in the .hip file!! The next time you load the hip file it's all still going to be there. This might be bad™, or this might be good™. You decide. Persistance ain't what it used to be. :-)
If it wasn't strings, you could create a new channel and then assign (floating point) values at particular frame-numbers on that channel (where $F becomes the index to the float array).
fun in heaps!
ben.
Edited by - Oct. 8, 2005 16:16:41
Houdini Lounge » $HOME
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hey,
just a thought/tip - the last time i used Houdini on a Windblows platform i just made a new directory called “houdini” at the top of the C: drive, and then used that as my $HOME.
C:\houdini\
You never have to deal with spaces in directory names, and it's fast to find what you want, because there's less M$ directory traversal. It was a simple thing to do, but everytime i went looking for files I smiled. It's also convenient to access via cygwin shell, etc. Good for home-computing, but of course would be a nightmare in a shared environment.
cheers,
ben.
PS. All that “My Blah” directory nomenclature is so childishly possessive! "No!? It's MINE!!!?!" … I don't think M$ ever understood a shared filesystem. It's all mine mine!! I tell you! :-) haha.
just a thought/tip - the last time i used Houdini on a Windblows platform i just made a new directory called “houdini” at the top of the C: drive, and then used that as my $HOME.
C:\houdini\
You never have to deal with spaces in directory names, and it's fast to find what you want, because there's less M$ directory traversal. It was a simple thing to do, but everytime i went looking for files I smiled. It's also convenient to access via cygwin shell, etc. Good for home-computing, but of course would be a nightmare in a shared environment.
cheers,
ben.
PS. All that “My Blah” directory nomenclature is so childishly possessive! "No!? It's MINE!!!?!" … I don't think M$ ever understood a shared filesystem. It's all mine mine!! I tell you! :-) haha.
Edited by - Oct. 10, 2005 19:58:13
Houdini Lounge » Legacy material?
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Houdini Lounge » scrubbing audio in timeline
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hi,
Houdini 8.0.383 / Gentoo Linux running on a Dell Laptop.
Yes, it does. I just loaded & scrubbed this wav file:
http://wahiduddin.net/troubleshooting/testing.wav [wahiduddin.net]
(i searched google for a test .wav file and found this link)
I saved that testing.wav file to /tmp, and then pointed a FILE CHOP to it. Set the green flag on the FILE CHOP so you hear the audio. There's a new button down the bottom right of the Houdini Panel (the playbar) which pops up the Audio Panel. Select TimeLine in that panel. You'll even see the audio represented as a wave under the timeline, where you scrub. Nice. Scrubbing works. It helps to set the playback to “realtime” - another button down to the right of the playbar.
I know this is not a windows-2000 test. Would this be a reason to start using Linux? :-)
regards,
ben.
Houdini 8.0.383 / Gentoo Linux running on a Dell Laptop.
Yes, it does. I just loaded & scrubbed this wav file:
http://wahiduddin.net/troubleshooting/testing.wav [wahiduddin.net]
(i searched google for a test .wav file and found this link)
I saved that testing.wav file to /tmp, and then pointed a FILE CHOP to it. Set the green flag on the FILE CHOP so you hear the audio. There's a new button down the bottom right of the Houdini Panel (the playbar) which pops up the Audio Panel. Select TimeLine in that panel. You'll even see the audio represented as a wave under the timeline, where you scrub. Nice. Scrubbing works. It helps to set the playback to “realtime” - another button down to the right of the playbar.
I know this is not a windows-2000 test. Would this be a reason to start using Linux? :-)
regards,
ben.
Houdini Lounge » /sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au is down?
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Houdini Lounge » /sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au is down?
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
I emailed a couple of the guys at VisLab mentioning the server was down. It looks like it's crashed; a “ping” says the host is down. It's still Sunday in Sydney so I wouldn't expect any fix till tomorrow. But who knows?! cheers, b.
Houdini Lounge » Houdini works on Slackware or Fedora?
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
I'm running Houdini on a dell laptop with gentoo linux installed (2.6 kernel). It's great. The nvidia drivers all work fine, at 1920x1200.
www.gentoo.org
The thing I like about gentoo is the “emerge sync” command which will safely update/compile all your sources, and it does “deep dependency” checking, so that you don't get stuck in dependency-hell (ie. get stuck with missing or incompatible libraries which you didn't realise were needed until it was too late…). We ran slackware at vislab, and that was cool, but as wolfwood says it's very “old skool”, and requires a fair bit of unix experience.
The trouble with the various linux distributions is you'll find zealous opinions about each of them. If I wasn't running Gentoo, then I'd consider Debian, and then perhaps SUSE.
I'm bored with the constant maintenance required to keep a linux machine running: gentoo lets me avoid all that.
cheers,
ben.
PS. The “update” command I run, perhaps once a week, is:
#!/bin/bash
#
# update everything, as per gentoo forum
# http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1060314#1060314 [forums.gentoo.org]
#
emerge sync
emerge -uDav world
emerge -av depclean
## revdep-rebuild -pv
revdep-rebuild -v
dispatch-conf
www.gentoo.org
The thing I like about gentoo is the “emerge sync” command which will safely update/compile all your sources, and it does “deep dependency” checking, so that you don't get stuck in dependency-hell (ie. get stuck with missing or incompatible libraries which you didn't realise were needed until it was too late…). We ran slackware at vislab, and that was cool, but as wolfwood says it's very “old skool”, and requires a fair bit of unix experience.
The trouble with the various linux distributions is you'll find zealous opinions about each of them. If I wasn't running Gentoo, then I'd consider Debian, and then perhaps SUSE.
I'm bored with the constant maintenance required to keep a linux machine running: gentoo lets me avoid all that.
cheers,
ben.
PS. The “update” command I run, perhaps once a week, is:
#!/bin/bash
#
# update everything, as per gentoo forum
# http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?p=1060314#1060314 [forums.gentoo.org]
#
emerge sync
emerge -uDav world
emerge -av depclean
## revdep-rebuild -pv
revdep-rebuild -v
dispatch-conf
Technical Discussion » Doc BUG: atan() and atan2()
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Huh,
It seems to be working ok here?
-> echo `atan2(1,1)`
45
Maybe that's a special case™? :^) b.
It seems to be working ok here?
-> echo `atan2(1,1)`
45
Maybe that's a special case™? :^) b.
Technical Discussion » SLOPES for Dummies
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hey,
I just scanned your post pretty quick, so i might not understand, especially as it seems my solution is too simple: Just add a “spare channel” which will be some floating point value between 0 and 1.
eg. Let's call the channel “slowdown”. You can find the Add Spare Channel option in the Operator Menu on any Houdini Pane. Then, where-ever you've been using $F now use $F*ch(“../slowdown”). If slowdown is set to 0.5 then you'll be running at half the speed. Nb. You might need to change the “..” bit to be the fullpath to where you created the channel. ie: /obj/model/slowdown or whatever.
ALternately, if this is an OTL, then you can create a Float type parameter in the interface and then use this as the divisor for $F.
I hope this idea gets you back on track.
cheers,
ben.
I just scanned your post pretty quick, so i might not understand, especially as it seems my solution is too simple: Just add a “spare channel” which will be some floating point value between 0 and 1.
eg. Let's call the channel “slowdown”. You can find the Add Spare Channel option in the Operator Menu on any Houdini Pane. Then, where-ever you've been using $F now use $F*ch(“../slowdown”). If slowdown is set to 0.5 then you'll be running at half the speed. Nb. You might need to change the “..” bit to be the fullpath to where you created the channel. ie: /obj/model/slowdown or whatever.
ALternately, if this is an OTL, then you can create a Float type parameter in the interface and then use this as the divisor for $F.
I hope this idea gets you back on track.
cheers,
ben.
Edited by - Nov. 1, 2004 15:38:18
Technical Discussion » Houdini Ebuild for Gentoo
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hey everyone. I was about to post a new topic on this!
I'm typing this from within Houdini, running on Gentoo Linux.
(2.4.26-gentoo-r9 #1 running on an i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1600MHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux)
There were a couple of gotcha's which haven't been mentioned.
First, though, let me say I think Gentoo Linux is brilliant. Some of you will know i've been running Houdini and IRIX for a very long time. I've moved to Gentoo after several other flavours of Linux. This is running on my personal laptop, dual booted with bloody Windows XP. I was running Redhat, but got sick of maintaining it. In the past I've also “done time” with Slackware, Debian, and even Yellow Dog on a mac powerbook! (out of interest). They're all bad (heh heh). VxWorks is a cool OS. :-)
The one thing which caught my interest was “portage” (aka “emerge”, aka “ebuild”). Make sure you understand what Gentoo's “emerge” will do for you before you dismiss it. Basically, emerge is like debian's apt-get,but it does ALL the dependency stuff properly. Ie: if A depends on B which depends on C, emerge will do the deep dependency thang. Very cool. So much more than a plain rpm. It's like IRIX's “inst” or “swmgr” on steroids. {Thanks to Mike Cronin for putting me onto Gentoo…}
The thing i love about Gentoo is you just type "emerge –sync“ and it updates everything over the net for ya. yay!! You can get Gentoo ”Stage 3“ up and running in about 2 hours, and then go back and ”hard core" re-compile everything while you use the system (if you can be bothered to do this). It feels pretty fast out-of-the-box. I downloaded 2 cd's via Windows (the Live CD and the Packages CD). Burnt the cd's using Windows-XP, and then booted and installed Gentoo over the top of my old Redhate.
Anyways. Sorry. I digress. You probably wouldn't be reading this if you weren't already interested…
I downloaded hfs7.0.192 from http://sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au/ [sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au]
Extracted the tar file and simply ran the install script and let it install where it wanted to go
(ie. into /opt/hfs7.0.192).
Here's my changes:
1. I found (naturally) the “sesinetd” wasn't running at first. This is generally why people were having the license problems. There's a local init script in /etc/init.d/local which you can take advantage of. I think this is the best way to go. The “sesinetd” from SESI gets installed in /etc/init.d so that's good. If you read /etc/init.d/local you'll see you need to edit
/etc/conf.d/local.start
just put a line in there like this:
# /etc/conf.d/local.start:
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/local.start,v 1.4 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $
# This is a good place to load any misc.
# programs on startup ( 1>&2 )
#
# Start the sesi license daemon
#
/etc/init.d/sesinetd start
and /etc/conf.d/local.stop
# /etc/conf.d/local.stop:
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/local.stop,v 1.4 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $
# This is a good place to unload any misc.
# programs you started above.
# For example, if you are using OSS and have
# “/usr/local/bin/soundon” above, put
# “/usr/local/bin/soundoff” here.
#
# Stop the sesi license daemon
#
/etc/init.d/sesinetd stop
Then, when you boot the sesinetd license daemon will start. Once it's running, you can
source the houdini environment and run houdini, or hkey, and get an Apprentice License or whatever. This is what i did. I initially ran “houdini” as root, so that i could have the right user-permissions to install the license. (I actually logged-in as root at the Xdm login to avoid the intial DISPLAY variable / xhost perm errors, which i'm yet to fix – i've just got Gentoo KDE installed tonight).
2. Another thing was the initial gentoo installation didn't have /bin/csh !!!??! And so the built-in hbrowser wouldn't start up. In the window where i started houdini I got the error:
Exec failed for: ./hbrowser
X11 Error (3): BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
X11 Error (3): BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
the simple (for gentoo) fix was to do this:
# emerge app-shells/csh
very cool. this gets csh off the net and compiles and installs it.
Weird that csh wasn't standard (even though “csh is considered dangerous”).
anyways.. that fixes that, as this post demonstrates.
Actually, in case you're interested, the way i knew to specify “app-shells/csh” was i'd previously run:
# emerge –search csh
Searching…
* app-shells/ccsh
Latest version available: 0.0.4-r2
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 11 kB
Homepage: http://ccsh.sourceforge.net/ [ccsh.sourceforge.net]
Description: UNIX Shell for people already familiar with the C language
License: GPL-2
* app-shells/csh
Latest version available: 1.29-r3
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 175 kB
Homepage: http://www.netbsd.org/ [netbsd.org]
Description: Classic UNIX shell with C like syntax
License: BSD
* app-shells/scsh
Latest version available: 0.6.5
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 4,211 kB
Homepage: http://www.scsh.net/ [scsh.net]
Description: Unix shell embedded in Scheme
License: as-is | BSD | GPL-2
* app-shells/tcsh
Latest version available: 6.12-r3
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 804 kB
Homepage: http://www.tcsh.org/ [tcsh.org]
Description: Enhanced version of the Berkeley C shell (csh)
License: BSD
* x11-misc/electricsheep
Latest version available: 2.5
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 604 kB
Homepage: http://electricsheep.org/ [electricsheep.org]
Description: realize the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet
License: GPL-2
I installed tcsh while I was at it.
This gentoo is using the nvidia-kernel ebuild. It was all pretty simple to get going.
The one hiccup I hit was to get Xdm running from boot, which required a
# rc-update add xdm default after changing the /etc/inittab to boot the “default” runlevel. I think I might have missed that part in the install doc's.
The other gotcha was sorted out once I worked out that I was looking to configure /etc/X11/xorg.conf instead of the old XConfig86-4 …. As i've got xorg-x11 installed. duh. In there you uncomment “Load glx” and glx things run muuuch better. ha ha. The installation doc's for gentoo are really good, btw. www.gentoo.org [gentoo.org]
cheers,
ben.
I'm typing this from within Houdini, running on Gentoo Linux.
(2.4.26-gentoo-r9 #1 running on an i686 Intel(R) Pentium(R) M processor 1600MHz GenuineIntel GNU/Linux)
There were a couple of gotcha's which haven't been mentioned.
First, though, let me say I think Gentoo Linux is brilliant. Some of you will know i've been running Houdini and IRIX for a very long time. I've moved to Gentoo after several other flavours of Linux. This is running on my personal laptop, dual booted with bloody Windows XP. I was running Redhat, but got sick of maintaining it. In the past I've also “done time” with Slackware, Debian, and even Yellow Dog on a mac powerbook! (out of interest). They're all bad (heh heh). VxWorks is a cool OS. :-)
The one thing which caught my interest was “portage” (aka “emerge”, aka “ebuild”). Make sure you understand what Gentoo's “emerge” will do for you before you dismiss it. Basically, emerge is like debian's apt-get,but it does ALL the dependency stuff properly. Ie: if A depends on B which depends on C, emerge will do the deep dependency thang. Very cool. So much more than a plain rpm. It's like IRIX's “inst” or “swmgr” on steroids. {Thanks to Mike Cronin for putting me onto Gentoo…}
The thing i love about Gentoo is you just type "emerge –sync“ and it updates everything over the net for ya. yay!! You can get Gentoo ”Stage 3“ up and running in about 2 hours, and then go back and ”hard core" re-compile everything while you use the system (if you can be bothered to do this). It feels pretty fast out-of-the-box. I downloaded 2 cd's via Windows (the Live CD and the Packages CD). Burnt the cd's using Windows-XP, and then booted and installed Gentoo over the top of my old Redhate.
Anyways. Sorry. I digress. You probably wouldn't be reading this if you weren't already interested…
I downloaded hfs7.0.192 from http://sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au/ [sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au]
Extracted the tar file and simply ran the install script and let it install where it wanted to go
(ie. into /opt/hfs7.0.192).
Here's my changes:
1. I found (naturally) the “sesinetd” wasn't running at first. This is generally why people were having the license problems. There's a local init script in /etc/init.d/local which you can take advantage of. I think this is the best way to go. The “sesinetd” from SESI gets installed in /etc/init.d so that's good. If you read /etc/init.d/local you'll see you need to edit
/etc/conf.d/local.start
just put a line in there like this:
# /etc/conf.d/local.start:
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/local.start,v 1.4 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $
# This is a good place to load any misc.
# programs on startup ( 1>&2 )
#
# Start the sesi license daemon
#
/etc/init.d/sesinetd start
and /etc/conf.d/local.stop
# /etc/conf.d/local.stop:
# $Header: /home/cvsroot/gentoo-src/rc-scripts/etc/conf.d/local.stop,v 1.4 2002/11/18 19:39:22 azarah Exp $
# This is a good place to unload any misc.
# programs you started above.
# For example, if you are using OSS and have
# “/usr/local/bin/soundon” above, put
# “/usr/local/bin/soundoff” here.
#
# Stop the sesi license daemon
#
/etc/init.d/sesinetd stop
Then, when you boot the sesinetd license daemon will start. Once it's running, you can
source the houdini environment and run houdini, or hkey, and get an Apprentice License or whatever. This is what i did. I initially ran “houdini” as root, so that i could have the right user-permissions to install the license. (I actually logged-in as root at the Xdm login to avoid the intial DISPLAY variable / xhost perm errors, which i'm yet to fix – i've just got Gentoo KDE installed tonight).
2. Another thing was the initial gentoo installation didn't have /bin/csh !!!??! And so the built-in hbrowser wouldn't start up. In the window where i started houdini I got the error:
Exec failed for: ./hbrowser
X11 Error (3): BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
X11 Error (3): BadWindow (invalid Window parameter)
the simple (for gentoo) fix was to do this:
# emerge app-shells/csh
very cool. this gets csh off the net and compiles and installs it.
Weird that csh wasn't standard (even though “csh is considered dangerous”).
anyways.. that fixes that, as this post demonstrates.
Actually, in case you're interested, the way i knew to specify “app-shells/csh” was i'd previously run:
# emerge –search csh
Searching…
* app-shells/ccsh
Latest version available: 0.0.4-r2
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 11 kB
Homepage: http://ccsh.sourceforge.net/ [ccsh.sourceforge.net]
Description: UNIX Shell for people already familiar with the C language
License: GPL-2
* app-shells/csh
Latest version available: 1.29-r3
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 175 kB
Homepage: http://www.netbsd.org/ [netbsd.org]
Description: Classic UNIX shell with C like syntax
License: BSD
* app-shells/scsh
Latest version available: 0.6.5
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 4,211 kB
Homepage: http://www.scsh.net/ [scsh.net]
Description: Unix shell embedded in Scheme
License: as-is | BSD | GPL-2
* app-shells/tcsh
Latest version available: 6.12-r3
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 804 kB
Homepage: http://www.tcsh.org/ [tcsh.org]
Description: Enhanced version of the Berkeley C shell (csh)
License: BSD
* x11-misc/electricsheep
Latest version available: 2.5
Latest version installed:
Size of downloaded files: 604 kB
Homepage: http://electricsheep.org/ [electricsheep.org]
Description: realize the collective dream of sleeping computers from all over the internet
License: GPL-2
I installed tcsh while I was at it.
This gentoo is using the nvidia-kernel ebuild. It was all pretty simple to get going.
The one hiccup I hit was to get Xdm running from boot, which required a
# rc-update add xdm default after changing the /etc/inittab to boot the “default” runlevel. I think I might have missed that part in the install doc's.
The other gotcha was sorted out once I worked out that I was looking to configure /etc/X11/xorg.conf instead of the old XConfig86-4 …. As i've got xorg-x11 installed. duh. In there you uncomment “Load glx” and glx things run muuuch better. ha ha. The installation doc's for gentoo are really good, btw. www.gentoo.org [gentoo.org]
cheers,
ben.
Houdini Lounge » hwee's hong kong walk-through
- ben simons
- 387 posts
- Offline
Hi,
Does anyone have a link (or copy) of Hwee's Houdini Walk-Through
(Walk-Thru?) of Hong Kong? He posted it to the list several years ago.
I wanted to show it to someone…
thanks in advance,
ben.
Does anyone have a link (or copy) of Hwee's Houdini Walk-Through
(Walk-Thru?) of Hong Kong? He posted it to the list several years ago.
I wanted to show it to someone…
thanks in advance,
ben.
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