Hi,
I'm fairly new to Houdini (Apprentice atm, HD soon) so bare with me.

I've successfully tracked a shot in Boujou and exported the camera as a .hip file which I then opened in Houdini.

Inside Houdini, the camera is automatically matchmoved perfectly with the footage thanks to the tracking data from Boujou. I lay down a text object as a test, and after a bit of tweaking with the depth and size etc, it fits pretty well and sticks fairly solidly to the floor.

My issue now is that when I go to render out the sequence, all I get is a black screen with loads of white noise and the very faint outline of the text, relative and true to it's position. The white noise seems to be directly linked to the ‘reference_points’ node, as when I turn the visibility on and off, the white noise appears and disappears.

I've attached a light into the mix as I normally would do, I really don't know what I'm doing wrong here. I've attached a screen shot of the situation at present.

Also, I've uploaded via ‘yousendit’ a .zip file containing the project file and image sequence if anyone would care to have a look at it? Not sure how/if the image sequence will relink on someone elses machine, but hey:
http://www.yousendit.com/download/UFVyK0drdGpCSm8wTVE9PQ [yousendit.com]

Words cannot describe how grateful I am of any help thrown my way with this one. I feel like I'm so close to getting the basics nailed, but one major factor still eludes me, arguably the most important factor: taking the sequence out of Houdini for viewing / final compositing.


Oh, not sure if this bares any resemblance to my issue, but when I open the file, I'm greeted with a brief error message about missing assets, regardless, it doesn't seem to affect the camera inside the project though, it's all matchmoved perfectly. Just when I come to render that the issue arrises

Sorry for the essay, but like I say, I'd be over the moon if anyone can shed any light and help solve this situation! I really would

Loving Houdini by the way, haven't had this much fun in years!!

Thanks in advance.
Chaz

There's no need to cross-posting, spamming the forum does not guarantee you get a reply sooner. So if you don't mind keep one thread active.

What I would test first is to render from the different camera, just to nail down this is the camera issue. So copy reference relevant parameters from the tracked camera onto the new camera (H11 I guess) and see how the render looks. From the top of my head, the hip file created by bojou is compatible with version 5.5 or 6 of houdini so some camera parameters names might be missing or interpreted in the wrong way by mantra.

Lorenz already explained the problems on the odForce thread. Basically, as he already mentioned:

1. You left the matchmove “reference_points” object displayed, so Mantra is trying to render them for you (it's a standard object set to “renderable”, so Mantra correctly assumes you want to see it rendered) – this is what I think you're calling “noise”: it's the reference “crosses”).
To fix: undisplay the reference_points object

2. The light mask in the “font_object2” object is wrong. It currently reads “spotlight1” (which doesn't exist – there's no light by that name). Set it to “*” (without quotes), this stands for “all lights”.

Good luck.

Mario Marengo & Kuba, thanks so much guys!!
Cannot describe how happy I am to know what was going wrong! Just could not get to the bottom of it, can't thank you both enough!

And Mario Marengo, thanks so much for looking at the project file and pointing out my mistake with the light. TBH I had no idea individual elements could choose to be affected by specific lights (or not, in this case). This changes a lot for me, as I've had problems like this many times before!

Again, thanks so much for your patience guys, you really have made my day. Sorry for spamming too, don't wanna clog the system, I'll get deleting asap.
Chaz