Hi,
When I do testrenderings, the sky is always black. Later I want to replace the sky in my scene with a compositing software like afx. For this reason I would like to have the background in a uniform blue or green. Unfortunatly I haven't found a place in the mantra settings or somewhere else, where I can select the standard background color. Can somebody point me to the right direction?

It is explained in the book ‘magic of houdini’ how to display the rendertime for an image in the console in Houdini 8. Unfortunatly I can't do it this way in 9.1. So how can I control(view) the rendertimes for one single picture or a sequence in 9.1?
greetings,
- Frankie

PS I am new to houdini and I do my first project. With the help of ‘magic of houdini’ and several video tutorials I solved a lot of problems until now. But some questions are left, where I cant find the answer at the moment.

the black areas of your render will be transparent…


in mplay hit “a” to view the alpha of your frame

Hi Frankie,

In mplay, type d to open Display Options. Go to the Background tab, select the colour you want and Accept. One more step is to turn on Transparency so View menu > User Interface > Display bar and it's the fourth icon from the bottom or Ctrl + shift + t.

For render time in the console, the same method from The Magic of Houdini should work but here's how you can do it for 9.x. Go to the mantra ROP's Properties > Statistics tab and change the Verbose Level to 1 or more.

Hope the above helps!

Cheers!
steven

Thanks a lot, at both!
I didn't know, that the alpha was right there. I checked it with a tif export to afx, and now I am fine ;-)
And I completley ignored the statistic tab in the Rop until now. The verbose setting did it, and was very interesting, too.
Thanks a lot again!
- Frankie