I am new to Houdini and have a question about exporting RIBs.

If I model and animate something in Houdini, and I want to dump it out to a sequence of RIBs, one per frame (with transform and deform motion blur) - is there an easy way to do this?

The only way I know to generate RIB is the “Save Geometry…” menu item when you right-click a SOP node. Obviously it would be too tedious to have to do this manually each frame.

I suppose I could hook up a “dummy” renderer and have Houdini render as if it were talking to RenderMan, which would dump the entire RIB to disk. But I want to dump *only* the geometry (and optionally lights), not the “header” stuff like Display, PixelSamples, etc.

Also, is there a script-level equivalent of the “Save Geometry” command, so that I could write a script that automatically dumped certain designated pieces of geometry out to separate RIB files?

f I model and animate something in Houdini, and I want to dump it out to a sequence of RIBs, one per frame (with transform and deform motion blur) - is there an easy way to do this?

Get Houdini Master and use an Rman ROP. I'm assuming you're using apprentice? Unfortunately there's no rman support in that. Houdini spits out the best RIB in the biz, but you need to pay for it. Until then, I'd fiddle with mantra - it's a very powerful renderer and the integration with the rest of Houdini make it highly flexible. We switched to mantra from Rman for that reason(plus all the tokens ).

Cheers,

J.C.

dmaas
I am new to Houdini and have a question about exporting RIBs.

If I model and animate something in Houdini, and I want to dump it out to a sequence of RIBs, one per frame (with transform and deform motion blur) - is there an easy way to do this?

The only way I know to generate RIB is the “Save Geometry…” menu item when you right-click a SOP node. Obviously it would be too tedious to have to do this manually each frame.

I suppose I could hook up a “dummy” renderer and have Houdini render as if it were talking to RenderMan, which would dump the entire RIB to disk. But I want to dump *only* the geometry (and optionally lights), not the “header” stuff like Display, PixelSamples, etc.

Also, is there a script-level equivalent of the “Save Geometry” command, so that I could write a script that automatically dumped certain designated pieces of geometry out to separate RIB files?

Hi Dan!

Welcome to Houdini :-)

Check out the opsave command. Open up the textport and type in “help opsave” for info. Note that the examples are slightly wrong, i.e.:

opsave -f 1 10 -i 2 twist1\$F.rib twist1

Should be:
opsave -f 1 10 -i 2 twist1 twist1\$F.rib

Here's the usage:
opsave [-f START END ] OPERATOR FILENAME


Take care,
Mark

While the opsave explanation is good info, I'd go with JC's post. opsave will never give you any of the rendering options like lights, motion blur, etc. In the commercial package, there's also the Archive Generator ROP which does exactly what you want.

edward
While the opsave explanation is good info, I'd go with JC's post. opsave will never give you any of the rendering options like lights, motion blur, etc. In the commercial package, there's also the Archive Generator ROP which does exactly what you want.

I thought he only wanted to dump geo.
Ah, I see, he'd like to include lights too.


–Mark

Thanks guys. An “archive generator” sounds like just what I want. (bonus points if it can also give me the bounding box for each RIB). With Maya I use MTOR's “archive export” feature, which sounds similar (although MTOR can't do lights). Motion blur is essential on both the transform and object deformation. Basically my workflow is

create stuff in various apps -> dump to per-frame RIBs -> integrate and render with custom code

I will see if I can get an eval license to try out this feature.

dmaas
I will see if I can get an eval license to try out this feature.

Do it!

I gotta feeling your gonna love the way Houdini “does RIB”; it's good stuff, tastes great & less feeling!


–Mark

Oh wait, I don't think Archive Generator outputs lights either as that would not be what most people want.