Is it possible to pipe rops , cops, or shops to fields that expect the loading of an image?

Ie. pipe a 3d texture generator to the expecting volome shop? Or pipe a Shadow shop to the expecting dephtmap entry? Or Pipe a cop to an expecting diffuse texture image slot?

I understand how rendering things to disk is far more effecient. However when initially setting things up its easier and cleaner to just connect nodes and worry about the files later.

You can only do thes last one where you use a cop in place of an image file. Any image file parameter can take this syntax: op:<full cop path>

For example, if you had a /img/img1/noise1 cop, you could use this in a texture file parameter in shops like this: opimg/img1/noise1

Excellent! This is great for texturing purposes in shops!

Thanks Ed!


ps. is there a chance of making the piping of other nodes into a RFE ^_^

For ROPs, you can always use a Render COP which then you can use to plug into all the usual places. I'm not sure what it means to plug SHOPs into anything else as they're instantiations of shaders.

Interesting…. render cop I'll have to give that a shot!

For SHOPs the most immediate use would be for depth maps. I have to admit im not use to dealing with saving out 300 frames worth of depth map images for several lights. I like the idea of houdini managing it for me while im involved in achieving a look. Then after, I don't mind at all disconnecting and saving out images for a faster final render that may have to be tweaked a little bit.

Its just file management really interupts the creative work flow especially with things like texturing and lighting, with so many layers that have endless tweaks involved.

edward
You can only do thes last one where you use a cop in place of an image file. Any image file parameter can take this syntax: op:<full cop path>

For example, if you had a /img/img1/noise1 cop, you could use this in a texture file parameter in shops like this: opimg/img1/noise1

I'd like to point out that the downside of this is that when the image is sent to mantra, it is not stored in .rat format, which means that there will be aliasing and memory issues. For interactive work, it's ok, but you might want to be aware of this issue.

thanks for the heads up!