Hello,

I've recently bought the Apprentice HD version 9.5. I see so many good things done in Houdini but I just cannot move forward, only because of an unexpected error.

I have a ZBrush displacement texture which I want to place on the lowres mesh inside Houdini. With the free Apprentice I had the problem that it said “failed to load Texture”. This message confused me, then the real problem was that I had the max size of 720x576 for the texture. Unfortunately this is still the same in Apprentice HD and it is a bit strange. How should I render a high resolution image with such a low resolution texture?????

Another thing that drove me crazy: I loved the addition of the sculpted fluid tool, but in my case I never get a nice fluid surface out of it. All I have are lonely particles which render like spheres. Why is that??

Hope I can solve this problems, then I'd love to continue working with Houdini.

Cheers

*push*

Does nobody see my problem here????

I agree the message “Failed to Load Texture” is misleading and should be changed to suggest the file size limitation.

Also, depending on how you save your textures with either COPS or Mplay you get inconsistent behavior on Apprentice and HD.

For example, open Mplay from the shell, load / save to .picnc and it will automatically scale your image down if it's above the restricted file size.

In COPS, if you use the File Output ROP it will throw an error on the node, which says there is a file size restriction.

Yeah, that sounds like a bug.

There is no mention of any texture resolution limits in the info or FAQ page.
I didn't think there was one for the regular Apprentice version either, but I guess there is.

Is it possible that you are still working off of the regular Apprentice license?

I understand that there is a texture size limitation inside the Apprentice version. You wouldn't need a 4k texture or even higher for an image to be rendered at 720x560. But for HD you should be able to render stills without image size limitation.

I'm definitely working in HD, because its written in the view port, the network view and the title that it is HD Non-Commercial Edition.

Question:
Have you tried rendering out any 1920x1080 images yet?

How does that work?

The rendering is easy. You can set the resolution for the camera inside the view tab when you are in the properties of the camera. And you can set the render resolution when you start up the renderer, after creating a render node.

If you want to know the basics, just go to www.3dbuzz.com. The Houdini fundamentals are free to watch and everything they create is just awesome.

By the way, there any Sidefx personal around here? Would be nice to hear what they say about this issue. I must admit, I'm not happy at the moment for what I have paid for.

From the Journal:

Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Houdini 9.5.203: Fixed a problem with loading high resolution texture files in mantra in Apprentice.

Thanks Graham!

Thanks a lot Graham, That sounds good.

Didn't want so sound too angry though, still very fascinated with Houdini.