Houdini 11.1 will be available for download starting the week of August 15, 2011 at www.sidefx.com and can be downloaded by all Houdini and Houdini Apprentice customers.

I'm guessing ‘the week of’ deliberately doesn't state a specific day for a reason.

Cheers,

J.C.

Yeah, it's impossible to keep up. I really just want a decent card without the obscene prices, and, as mentioned, quadro just seems to avoid a lot of problems I keep reading about for a bit more money(the 580 is only around $250 cheaper). The enclosure would be a Boxx, and they're usually pretty good with sound and cooling…

My primary concern is ‘omg don’t be buying that - it doesn't support <insert API here> and all you get is pwn'ed!'

Thanks

J.C.

Pricing a new workstation, for Houdini, would be doing simming/rendering. Was thinking the quadro 4000 was a good balance for age/value and power. The gtx 580 isn't really much cheaper…any thoughts? Quadro been berry berry good to me…

Thanks in advance!

J.C.

/Monday Grumpies ON


I think the concept is flawed. Tablets have a long, *long* way to go before they hit the realm of (say) a power graphics laptop. Just brushing it off as ‘well it’s just a matter of time' doesn't apply here. What are tablets for? Mostly games and internet. They are convenient information and entertainment machines. For the hardware to escalate to doing sims on it, you need the market to drive the hardware development in that direction. I don't think that's going to happen, who out there wants a tablet on par with a workstation with all the inevitable heat and (primarily) battery issues? Sure as hell not the masses. What's happening out there is workstations are being marginalized. They won't die, there will still be people that need to do real work on workstations, but it will be nothing like the huge volume that the tablet market will generate. And the way things in mass computing are going now is ‘good enough’. People aren't buying Bluray's, they're subscribing to Netflix. Landfill media is dying, people want a small convenient and powerful information machine(tablet), *maybe* a workstation(altho fewer and fewer), and people who need to write a lot for a living will stick with laptops. TVs are getting smarter. The people buying all these things are driving the market, and they aren't willing to pay for the R&D to build a practical workstation in a tablet.

More than anything, battery technology needs to take a profound step forward for even the current projections to work. The Chinese government is dumping huge amounts of yuan into battery tech R&D, and that's smart. That's going to drive what happens next.

This isn't even discussing the fact you can't practically use Houdini without a keyboard.

For the record, I have a Xoom, and I love it. This isn't about tablet hate. I use it every day, a whole lot. I just don't think this is an accurate perception of where the market is going.

I'll pop back in a few years and read this post and wince, betcha.

Cheers,

J.C.

AFAIK there's no limit, if the OS supports it, mantra will use it. However, might be worth waiting for someone behind the code to verify. I'm sure there's a practical limit to how many they've *tested*.

Cheers,

J.C.

I seem to recall back when testing 10 or 11, there was a claim that LD_LIBRARY_PATH would simply be ignored by Houdini. We recently came across a similar problem when one of the guys here had a declaration for that, we just got rid of it and all was well again. Hate the bloody thing, myself. Is it possible to get Houdini to utterly ignore it? Or is it one of these deep-rooted things that have proven difficult to code around?

Cheers,

J.C.

FWIW I'm using 270.41.06 on an FX card and have no troubles. Thanks for the heads up, though, either the card is related or something happened between my and that upgrade that rattled the monkey's cage…

Cheers,

J.C.

Sorry for resurrecting this old horse, but just to let those that were pinched by this fbx issue that today's release(11.0.713) now has the three older fbx export formats back! Haven't had a chance to test yet, but yay!

Cheers,

J.C.

I for one welcome our new hackysack overlords…wait, am I missing the point?

Btw, Apple released a new type of phone called the iPhone - any news of a Houdini port?

Cheers,

J.C.

Check out this thread [sidefx.com].

Cheers,

J.C.

In the camera, View tab, Background image…

Cheers,

J.C.

For graphics work, I still find NVidia preferable to ATI. They seem to be incapable of ever rising about ‘barely tolerable’ drivers, and are usually significantly below that. NVidia has it's ups and downs, but once you find a sweet spot, it works. ATI hardware is pretty good, it's all about the drivers.

I'm assuming you're talking windows - linux…a no-brainer. The drivers are even worse on Linux…

Cheers,

J.C.

The indirect lighting got pulled out of the ROP and into the new Indirect Lighting…errr…light. Take a look at the docs for this new operator in the help.

Cheers,

J.C.

Ooops, I meant to mention that tool, yeah. It's not bad, it's what I'm using now to move between the packages at the moment. It's a port of a Maya2Nuke tool, I had to hack it a little, but it does the job. Plus, being code it's more transparent than fbx, which is basically a black box from the end user perspective.

As far as the snowflake example, you can render whatever you'd like into exr layers, that ends up being a shading exercise. I have a gizmo I cobbled together which takes a mantra exr containing all the standard PBR direct and indirect layers, assembles them in the final beauty pass by default. In between, I have CC and sometimes blurring settings so you can tweak the diffuse, relflect, emit etc all on the fly. It's pretty handy and quite fast as long as you're outputting zip1 compression on your exrs…

Cheers,

J.C.

Atm the latest Houdini exports only one flavour of FBX which doesn't carry over camera animation into Nuke(possibly all animation). This is a bug(in Nuke, they know about it). Houdini 11.0.526 is the last build with the old multi-flavour export, and I believe I had tried that and it worked reasonably well. I'm quite suspect of something as complex as a DOPs sim making the journey intact, though. I certainly don't see anything like a fluid sim working, apart from writing out geo's of the surface. Don't expect screaming speeds either. I'm a little unclear what you're expecting from Nuke, however. It does have a pretty nice 3D environment, but it's not close to as full featured as a 3D package…

You can control things like uv, position, some basic shading etc…

Cheers,

J.C.

Not in any way wishing to hijack this thread, I'm actually very interested in the outcomes, but where do we stand with NVidia driver version atm? I remember at one point there was a horrible bug in the latest/greatest, but seem to recall there was a hax workaround and the latest was fine.

In a fit of pique, I upgraded to 260.19.12 on Linux and have been waiting for the explosion. It seems OK so far…

Cheers,

J.C.

I'd post a file. How thin a leaf are we talking here? Strikes me that a very thin one will take some special loving to get it to work nicely. Also, to ensure the farm isn't related, you can repro locally with a couple frames?

Cheers,

J.C.

Just checking, but you're not recreated the pc every frame are you? You can just write out one, and reference it…shouldn't buzz. The object can animate, just if you deform, it does indeed need a pc per frame.

tbh, I haven't gotten into deforming geo yet with SSS, it's on my list though. Supposedly with 11 it's much cleaner with potential buzzing issues with deforming data.

Cheers,

J.C.

*cough*

Probably not.

JC

HA. The waves ripple outwards…

I just placed a report in on this a couple days ago. The problem is, the SDK, not SESI, actually determines what versions you can output, and it would seem the latest only offers the latest. Which kinda sucks since this flavour doesn't even work with Autodesk's own Inferno! It also doesn't work with Nuke.

The problem is, this renders the FBX export useless to us. It was a really handy way to move files around the shop. SESI is looking into getting the new ones working elsewhere, but I'm unsure this is going to help most of the people hit by this. I'm hoping others might speak up if they're noticing problems with this version. So far, the only app I've gotten to properly read these files is Houdini. :-/

Cheers,

J.C.