Hi all,

Does anyone know if a way in expressions to detect what renderer is asking for an object or light's definition?

If there isn't a way, could I RFE a local variable or an expression for it?

For example; in my shadowmap name field:


“myshadowmap”+ifs($RENDERER==“renderman”,“.tx”,“.pic”)
“myshadowmap”+ifs(currentrenderer()==“renderman”,“.tx”,“.pic”)


Thanks,
Jason

While the question still stands, it looks like renderman doesn't seem to care whether I call a .tx file a .pic file anyway. So my direct need is sorted out, but this might still be a decent question

Could you do a “set -g RENDERER” in your pre-render script?

As for shadowmaps, the filename just gets put into a device line in the RIB as tiff output regardless of what you call it.

I suppose that could work, but for general purpose tools, there is no telling what ROP the user of the tool will use; so I can't really rely on a pre-frame script for this.

Thanks,
Jason

The Select SHOP can switch shaders based on renderer, could this not be useful?

But you are most likely familar with that, and wouldn't be helpful for doing Auto-Gen shadow maps?

In that case, Edward's suggestion is a good solution, one could change the creation script for the render nodes to add this on creation. Of course any existing nodes would have to be treated differently.

The docs suggest using a RENDERPASS variable for doing such things (See Switch SHOP), but they say that you must set this variable before rendering.

There is also the RenderMask for shaders, not sure it there is a way to abuse this or not. That suggests that it wouldn't be too difficult to make a function or variable accessable in Houdini to do what you want, but I don't think one currently exists.