I have been looking online and have not found much about the labs biome tools other than the help cards. I bet in the beta forums there is a wealth of info. Anywhere else to look? Any example files?

On our work machines i have found a network write of a VDB, it streams to the server in small increments slowing it down in a big way. writing locally then moving it is faster. i may roll this into our cache node or look for a environment variable to solve the problem

we found one thing that helped. in the hython script that loads the file to render, the pipeline guys put a 10 second pause, this gave the hython session some time to catch up to the loading of the hip file and not error.

I think we have just got this issue in our studio’s render farm. When it happens a gob will get into the state on 4 out of 5 jobs. Render jobs that don’t come from IFD’s rendering on karma CPU or XPU, redshift and even geo processing. The last thing in the logs is..

Rendering frames 1010-1019

Then nothing. The node will use 1% cpu and not unlock unless it times out. It’s hard to debug as ther is nothing else in the logs.

i am glad i found this thread! FYI you cant use a tablet when using the little window to find your area, it throws nan errors. you must use a mouse. although i failed to have my edits work.
(after installing mercantile) here are my edits
5 import mercantile
125 #terrain_url = "https://api.mapbox.com/v4/mapbox.terrain-rgb/ [api.mapbox.com]" + str(lon) +"," + str(lat) + "," + str((zoom+1)) + "/1024x1024@2x.png?access_token=" + API_KEY
126 #fixed code
127 x, y, z = mercantile.tile(lon, lat, zoom)
128 terrain_url = f"https://api.mapbox.com/v4/mapbox.terrain-rgb/ [api.mapbox.com]{z}/{x}/{y},512@2x.pngraw?access_token={API_KEY}"

this is the error, when i find my location and press download...

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "labs::Sop/mapbox::2.1, PythonModule", line 222, in <lambda>
File "labs::Sop/mapbox::2.1, PythonModule", line 63, in on_button
File "labs::Sop/mapbox::2.1, PythonModule", line 169, in refresh
File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.435/houdini/python3.9libs\hou.py", line 16929, in cook
return _hou.Node_cook(self, *args, **kwargs)
hou.OperationFailed: The attempted operation failed.
Error while cooking.

The redshift plug-in loading and licensing adds about 25 seconds to each frame I render with karma. When your frame is 2 seconds and the redshift crap is 25 it kinda ruins the party. I am keen for any ideas or workarounds.

So I am making a set of explosions with a volume, frame by frame changing spark geometry and point instanced chunks. I have made the proxy geometry for each of the 3 elements and made 9 different versions of the explosion.

I am trying to make an asset that can be placed down have its variants switched on its 3 elements and be time shifted. I have vdb’s for the pyro and usd’s for all the other elements. I have made a version that can variant switch and be duplicated. As for time shifting that isn’t working as I expected. I am trying to write the asset to disk and re load it in with mixed results. There will be 1-5 explosions per shot used so it is ok to be a bit inefficient.

How can I time offset it. How should I structure it?

So I am trying to get a tree drawing and grooming hda that used states to be very interactive. I got the idea of the stroke state and caching my strokes, getting them to snap in depth in 3D to existing branches. I even picked apart the “guide groom” hda that is full of good information. After inserting a cache step at the top of the guide groom hda and caching it at the start of the poststroke action I was able to see the sop chain working and was able to extract just what I need to do the screen space grooming.

I am now trying to find out how sidefx get interactive deformation of the geometry as they stroke. Once I have this trick I can unlock more warm and fuzzy interactions and something that may be less intuitive if you had to finish drawing a stroke to see what happens.

So how are sidefx getting feedback before the stroke has finished?

Akelian now your post is destination of the google search!

In fully licensed H16.599 if I export an animated camera to an alembic and bring it back in again with an alembic archive, when I click build hirachy… houdini crashes. I will log a bug but I want to check if it is just me.

The camera comes from pftrack is parented to a scaled null and is exported with an alembic rop in /out.

I have also tried a camera with no parenting and it is constrained to that camera with chops. I have also used chrefit to bake all key frames. Still crashing. I must be doing something wrong because, how is this bug still out there, you can't export a valid camera. That's huge.

I will attach the the hip file and alembic when I get to work for you to inspect.

I haven't trusted houdini camera exports since H14.5

When Jeff presented H16 at our studio last week, I proposed this analogy…. to the conclusion to think of materials and the VOPs they contain like…. VOP sops and the VOPs they contain. He agreed that this was a valid analogy.

When you think about shops think that you only had the option to make 1 VOP sop to shape an imported bit of geometry, so you had to configure and hack that one VOP sop to do the whole job in one go. This reflects the part where you apply one shop and it does all the work, so you open it up and get hacking, or make an uber shader and tweak it to the Nth degree. Now with materials you can think of it as if you can use multiple, ether pre made VOP SOPs or roll your own that you can mix and match to create your look. Also you can use fairly primitive VOP SOPs combined with complicated ones feeding off each other. You can still make your own all in one VOP SOPs or roll your own higher level tools that are not meant to be used on their own but always with other nodes.

Thinking of it this way made it crystal clear for me, since I am good friends with VOP SOPs.

So this was fixed in a recent version….

Houdini 15.0.421: Fixed an issue in the finite element solver that was preventing the parameters External Velocity Field and External Velocity Offset from being applied in a simulation.

Although the documentation of how to use an “External Velocity Field” in a finite element solver is a bit sparse.

Has anyone got a super simple use of a bit of cloth being lifted by rising smoke in a sim, using the “External Velocity Field” in the drag parameters of a cloth object?

i am glad this post is in here and not only submitted as a bug report, I needed it.

Guess i was wondering why the hell there is a softimage forum reading the posts then added the post, I didn't pay attention when I added the topic.

I tried the gravity on frame 2 trick and went back to the big concrete slab trick.i must have some inter penetration and this force to fix this on the first frame is moving the geometry without the need for gravity. So being attached to a 25 tone slab, and stiiting on another slab fixes that.

thanks. my solution was to make the cliff dynamic and have a big slab of concrete attached to it and then sit that on top of another slab of static concrete.

Attachments coming out of our office are a non trivial event. He said siting at the only work station that you are able to attach files on.

I have a sim of a character on the edge of a cliff, at key moments parts of the cliff crumble. So my sim includes a static part of the cliff, larger chunks to fall off and small slivers of rock.

the static cliff is a non active bullet object. all the rest of the chunks are active and glue adjesent is used to hold it all together. All objects are packed rbd objects. I am dissolving the glue in the sops constraint network like one of the examples that come with the h13 bullet masterclass video.

On the first frame all the parts of the sim jump down, a small distance and then the sim behaves as you would expect from there.

I set up a super simple example to show it happening. in the example file it moves much less but shows the problem. in my scene it is moving about 5 cm relive to the character.

repligrid.hip

I was hopeing to learn a thing or two from this file but get an error when rendering in H13.0

mantra: Error initializing procedural ‘ptreplicate’ on object /obj/grid_object1

EDIT: not working on houdini 13.0.260 in windows, is working in H13.0.288

here is the attachment

Hi Peeps, I am trying to accumulate particles into SDF?

I have a simple particle system and i want to accumulate particle into adding to the SDF that i am using as a collision. I expect that treating the SDF as a dop data thing then sop solving it is the way but i am first stuck as to reference or wire the SDF if it is from dop data. then the fetching of particles will be interesting. once in a sop solver things should be as i expect.

Has anyone dealt with this kind of interaction in the new H13 particle system environment?

check out my file to see where i am at now. I have a more complicated and successful SDF collider but i wanted to keep it a bit more simple in this example.