I set up a pipeline with Massive and Houdini, to load the agent archive ribs from Massive with Houdini, do the lighting and camera work there and render it with PRman. It´s all working, except when I render with houdini I got artifacts on the geometry (=> attached picture), but if I render it directly from Massive it works. And the same lights and light shaders are used.

Somebody know this behaviour? Any help would be great!!!

I can also make a houdini test scene, if needed, but to test it you need Massive running…

Hi!!

Have you try to use calculate normal for your shader inside houdini instead of the default normals?

I have the same problem when i try to render a model with catmull clark subdivision active; the solution is to recalculate that normals with the help of the rsl fuction.

Thanks for you fast reply!

Have you try to use calculate normal for your shader inside houdini instead of the default normals?

How can I recalculate the normals inside Houdini? Do you mean in the .sl shader file?
The geometry and its shader (the prman standard paintedplastic) is just an archive rib from Massive in Houdini and Catmull-Clark subdivision is not active on it.
I'm a bit confused about where the failure could be…

I had the same problem before. I solved it in this way :


(If the models are built with maya)
import the models from maya into houdini, use facet sop to re-calculate the normals.

export the models for massive to do the sim and export to ribs.

Import the ribs into Houdini to render with PRMAN.


Hope this helps.

^_^

@yckosmo: sounds good and I tried it, but no effect
except fixed normals, what is very cool by the way!

I just found out, that these are shadow artifacts, if I disable the transmission visibility, or set the width in the light shader to zero, they are gone.
But what confuses me is that the rib file from Houdini, refers to the same light shader as the render rib from Massive, which renders no artifacts.

And more confusing is, it works when I delete the Attribute “identifier”, “obj/distantlight1”, in the LightSource line. :?: :?: :?:
strange…

How did you guys manage to load RIB files in Houdini?

leix
How did you guys manage to load RIB files in Houdini?

Houdini doesn't import RIB's as geometry, but it does allow you to attach RIB files as archives on proxy objects (nulls or otherwise). You can also use the delayed load procedural.

This tutorial is very basic, but it may shed some light. (Surely your renderer documentation has much more to offer)

http://www.fundza.com/rib/bakerib/index.html [fundza.com]

Ahh I see..Thank's for replying.

Look's like exporting FBX files is the way to go then

Hi, I was hoping OP would be so kind as to elaborate on their method for bringing the ribs into Houdini. I understand how Rib archives work, so are you parsing the the apf's or amc's to get your proxy objects in Houdini and then assigning each a Rib Archive? If so, how are you parsing those files?

Thanks in advance!