I'm trying to set up a Wedge ROP network so that I can cache to disk, make flipbooks and then have the image sequences converted to separate video files with a render script using ffmpeg that I put in the Post-Render Script on the OpenGl ROP or in the Pre-Render Script on a Shell ROP that comes after the OpenGL ROP.

At the moment, it all works fine for the 1st wedge iteration.
I get the caches, I get the image sequence and ffmpeg gets called and successfully converts the images to a video file.
Then the wedge errors out and all it says is “Error rendering child: /out/wedge1/shell1”, with no further information.
The odd thing there is that even when I don't use the Shell ROP in my network, it still says that one is the problem.
But it only shows the error on the Wedge ROP.
When I don't call the render script and wedge for 3 iterations, I get 3 caches and 3 image sequences.
So I'm guessing something is going wrong after the script when the wedge is supposed to go to the second iteration.

For the moment I sort of worked around it by flipbooking all wedges before converting them to a video.
After the wedge, the image sequence gets converted to an .mp4 with all versions in 1 file.

Even though this is fine for me, I'd still like to be able to create a video per wedge.
So if anybody has some input in the meantime, it'd be much appreciated.

I also found that the Shell ROP that was giving errors is inside the Wedge ROP.
Not sure how to fix that since all it seems to be doing is run “hou.node('..').hdaModule().applywedge(hou.node('..'))” as a Pre-Frame Script and I'm not too familiar yet with these scripts.

Hey there Eckxter, did you get anywhere with solving the ‘shell1’ error?
I'm getting the exact same behaviour with a pyro sim + wedges.

add me to the club guys, exactly the same error. trying to wedge a flip sim, geocache and image sequence render smoothly. but when trying to call the shell ROP to generate a mp4 throw ffmpeg, only the first wedge compute properly, then i get this exact same Error rendering child : /out/wedge1/shell1.

i think the pb is that the shell ROP is not able to evaluate wedge properly. As mention previously inside the Wedge ROP, sesi already use a Shell ROP, so i'm pretty sure that as the wedge already lunch a shell then the ffmpeg shell is open, but it can't manage the fact that 4 shell must be executed sequentially, at one moment he lost his mind.

The true solution to this would be to ditch the old rusty ROP things and move all the damn things on PDG.