I've been watching the User Guide Lesson Two tutorial on here and I'm having trouble at the part where he switches on the display flag and render flags. He uses it so the render flag is on the points so he can substitute his higher res object in at the object level using the Mantra instance rendering feature.

When I do it, everything works fine while I'm inside the object (I see my low res placeholder boxes instead of the higher res pegs), but when I go back up to object level, there's now an instance of a peg on each point of the placeholder boxes in addition to the original points. The render comes up correctly with the pegs just on the original points, but the viewport is extremely slow with the extra objects.

I'm using Houdini 12 and it looks like he's using 11 if that makes a difference. Starts at 31:10 and again at 1:13:45.
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1845&Itemid=351 [sidefx.com]

Scene file attached. notes attached

Rob

Thanks for the reply, but your scene is doing the same thing on my computer as the problem I was having. Everything displays fine when I go into the instancer, but when I back up to the object level there are instances on the objects that are display only.

I changed my viewport renderer to see if that would fix it and the only one that displays correctly is H11. All of the GL versions seem to mess it up. Is it a problem with my video card (GeForce GTX 460), or maybe the free apprentice edition?

there are instances on the objects that are display only

Whats wrong with that. Does it render correctly and can you tell what area the objects will take up when applied to the points ?.

Rob

The problem is it's putting instances of the hi res objects onto the points of the low res display objects. So it's not displaying the proxy, but much more instances of the hi res object (see attachment).

Huh …

So is this happening to the scene I posted on your machine. If so i would advise upgrading to the latest daily build and checking out your graphics card drivers. Ive not had this problem on OSX or Linux

Rob

The GL3 renderer can do instancing natively in the viewport, so you don't need the copy SOP with the display flag on it to do it for you. If you do, it'll instance the box on all points – the corners of the boxes you've manually instanced. In this case, just put the display and render flag on the render node.

@circusmonkey: I updated to the latest build and latest graphics driver and it still happens while using any of the GL modes. Any other ideas?

@twod: This is a simplified example. The idea is to use a low res version for the viewport and hi res with more detail for the rendering, so putting the display and render flag on the same node doesn't work, unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean..

If you want lesser detail on the objects being instanced, you need to separate the display/render flags in the object that you're instancing, not the object containing the points to instance onto (unless you're using fewer points for the viewport display).

If you dive into the instance object, switch to wireframe and turn on point display, those are the points that the GL3 renderer will be instancing onto. In the simple example, because you've manually copied boxes to each point in the instance object, the GL3 renderer is using the vertices of the boxes as instance points. This isn't what you want, but it is not a viewport bug.

That was circusmonkey's file, I didn't set that up. And it happens when I use GL 1.2 & 2.1, not just 3.2.

But in the video in the link I posted, I followed along exactly to what he did and got results like in the screenshot I posted.

I understand what to do from watching the video in the link I originally posted, but as you can see from the screenshots I posted later my viewport display changes when I go back up to object level. It even happens for me in the sample file circusmonkey posted.

I've only been using Houdini for a few weeks so I don't know if there's a setting somewhere, or it's just a glitch with the hardware I have..

The demo is designed for the H11 viewport, which cannot do point instancing. If you'd like to replicate it using the GL viewports, turn off “Point Instancing” in the display options' Geometry tab.

Thanks twod, that works!