I would like to extract the images of my houdini model. The one way i know is from mantra rendering. However, it gets quite complicated with all the lighting and rendering settings. The results usually have very faint edges which i do not want, I would like to have sharp and clearly define edges. Is it possible to do a wireframe render within the mantra node ? I know there is a wireframe render, but if thats the case i will need to output 2 images and then overlay them again.

I basically just want a simple and rough image of the view port image, I guess that would be the simplest way. So can anyone advice on how I can actually extract the view pot image ?

(even if i prnt scrn, i still need to crop the images afterward which is tedious, plus i am using commandline to control houdini so i think prnt scrn wont work)

You have tried this button?

But if PrintScrn, overlaying an image over a background or cropping is too much hassle, I'm not sure this is what you're after…

yup thanks that button works , but as i mention before i am accessing houdini thru a command line. I found the hscript command to trigger the flip book, but i cant get the command to work

viewwrite -f 1 10 Build.pane2.world.persp1 ip

this is from the example on the help page , i dun really understand “Build.pane2.world.persp1 ” I would assume persp1 is the name of the view port, how about build? pane2? world? thanks

I can't get it to work either.

Have you tried hython? I can't get hou.GeometryViewport to work (asks me for an instance as an argument) and the docs don't give any examples but perhaps you know more about such things than me and can get it to behave. Please let me know if you do!

Unfortunately I'm pretty sure this isn't possible.

When Houdini is run in non-graphical mode there are no open gl viewports you can access. For example, in a regular Houdini session, you can go “viewls *” in an Hscript textport to get a list of all viewer panes. It gives you them in the same format you need to use with viewwrite. However, if you attempt to call it in hbatch, you will get an error saying that “viewls not supported by this application.” The same thing goes for Hython. In order to get instances of hou.GeometryViewport for example, you need access to the hou.ui module, which is not available in hython.

Since there is no concept of viewports in non-graphical applications I'm pretty sure you are out of luck.