Been trying to wrap my head around all that is PDG because it really seems like it's going to save me about 1.6 billion years of iteration time. Getting there, but could use some help.
Breaking this into sections to make it easier to read…
1) Examples
So I've been through the SideFX tutorials, the Entagma tutorials, and through the Mutagen video. The first question I have is for SideFX. This page is a great example of what I–and I'm guessing a lot of users–want to do with TOPs/PDG:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/tops/wedge.html [www.sidefx.com]
Are the example scene files for the shown simulation, variation, and level of detail wedging available somewhere? I've popped a lot of the related node example files, but haven't seen anything close to these real-world examples.
2) Resuming Work
Let's say you've been putting together a PDG. You get the geo written out but the recess bell rings and it's one of the three sunny days a year in Seattle and you don't want to miss it. So, you save your file, quit out of Houdini, and head out.
Once you reopen the file, how can you get a node to either understand that it should be looking for existing/pre-cooked data or guarantee that making it dirty will override existing data?
The results seem inconsistent; sometimes a node like ROP Geo Output sees a bake already on disc, sometimes not. Sometimes I dirty a node and it seems to think there's still usable data on disk when there isn't. I fell like And it's just painful when a ROPFetch render node gets accidentally dirtied…
3) Standalone-ish Node Options
If you have a series of images from a non-PDG wedge set (I'll get to the why of that in a sec), is there any way to reference those images with the ImageMagick montage and FFMpeg nodes to create animated contact sheets?
4) PDG and Redshift
As it stands now, I can get a Mantra-rendered, animated sim contact sheet out of PDG using a slightly modified setup from Adrian Meyer's Mutagen Toolset. That's the TOP_Mutagen network in the attached file.
I can also use an old school Wedge setup to create similar frame sets via Redshift, but not sure how to compile those into a contact sheet.
I've tried a bunch of different ways to get a Redshift ROP to work, and I'm almost there with a For loop that is getting iterations from upstream. Still isn't quite working, though. That's the incomplete TOP_Wall_Sim network in the file.
I know people have managed to get PDG to work with Redshift even though the functionality isn't technically there yet. Any guidance there would be a huge help. Have posted in the RS forums but no luck yet.
Oof…sorry, that was a lot. Just have burned a lot of time on this without quite getting what I need. Any help woiuld be great.
Thanks!
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mC