Can we please stop this thread for good?

We had this problem in 8.2 couple of weeks ago with PRman. Unfortunately I don't have the test case with me but it was exactly as Jason found, everything apart from NURBS was outputting the normal properly (and we tried all sorts of tricks to make it work).

probbins
I just noticed this;
If Houdini hangs you can force it to crash with

kill -SEGV #pid

This causes a seg fault sending Houdini into its regular crash sequence, thus saving out a file to /tmp.

I would be curious how/on what conditions this works/can be invoked. On my system at work (Fedora7 mutant) -SIGV doesn't seem to exist as a flag. Is it a SUSE specific thing (that would be freaky)? Any clues?

Thanks.
Andras

Hi,

It would be so great if mantra supported exclusive AOVs in a future version.
See the following example for an “exclusive AOV”. Essentially the user should be able to specify which objects she wants in a deep raster.

Say you have sphereA with shaderA writing into AOVA, and you have sphereB with shaderB writing into AOVB. Currently sphereA would still write to AOVB, but only appear as a black hole. By implementing this feature, the user could specify to exclude sphereA from AOVB completely.

This would have a slight overhead as the renderer would need to shade the stuff behind sphereA (supposing that's over sphereB), but still would save a lot of time/organisation effort.

Please see another renderer for extra information:
http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_49.html [3delight.com]
http://www.3delight.com/en/uploads/docs/3delight/3delight_48.html#SEC128 [3delight.com]

Hi,

I have a particle simulation cache (bgeo sequence) that I would like to render as a ReadArchive in Mantra8 (Houdini 8.2.154).

It renders fine if it does through a FileSOP, but not as “Render from file” on the geo level. It also works in Renderman both ways. It also works if I use “Render points only from file”.

Here is what I tried:
- vary what's inside the SOPnet just in case, but didn't really help
- use the BBX triggered versions of this, providing a proper BBX
- another, simple particle system that I've built from scratch..still no joy
- looking at the IFDs, they seem to be ok

Is/was this a known limitation?
Any possible workarounds?

Thanks,
Andras

msalek: something along the lines of http://fundza.com/algorithmic/nebula/index.html [fundza.com]?

There is a way to do this in H8 as well.

If I remember correctly, the command passed to the IFD is called ray_motionfactor. To pass this to the IFD properly, it has to be a pre-include on the cameras render tab (eg.: ray_motionfactor 1).

On the other hand..now that you've mentioned you're on H8. We had serious problems with rendering heavy (that means 3-4 x 600k polygons) deformation blurred geometry together with raytracing (occlusion) in mantra8. In that situation there wasn't extreme blur as the camera was following the objects, but it was still showing this problem. It went away in mantra9.

Nevermind, had to use the shadow call through the inline vop in the illuminance loop..just like mantra (I had some screwed casting the stopped me to debug this properly until I wrote a small test shader in code).

Hi,

I'm trying to break down a shader I did for an effect as a VOPnet and
would like to pull the shadow into my illuminance loop to be
exported as an AOV just like I used to do in mantra, but the Shadow
VOP seems to be missing in the RSL context.

Any way to do this without switching to coding? Which I would be ok to
do but given the lack of time I wouldn't attempt if not necessary +
the shader is 99% there already and instances of it are deployed in my
asset couple of times).

Inline code maybe?

Thanks,
Andras

It would be great to have parameters to dial the contributions of transformation, deformation and velocity blur contributions to the final look. Or at least remove the hierarchical nature of it (ie. right now it's not really possible to have velocity blur without transformation blur).

It would come handy for example in the case of rendering FX from a fast moving camera. Keep the velocity blur on the particles and do some additional camera blur in post.

Thank you,
Andras

To avoid calling the hexpression engine too often (as it could have a performance hit with a large amount of points), you could do something like (combined with SYmek's ideas) to get the indexes of the points. Then on the points of hou.pwd().geometry().points run this as a filter.
Don't forget to cast them to the appropriate type:

pointList = hou.hscriptExpression(“”“pointlist(”/obj/geo1/group1“, group1)”“”).split()

Sorry for the crosspost with the list:

Hello,

I bumped into an interesting problem with my third python SOP:

Basically I generate point positions for each integer frame, and from this, I (for now) linearly blend subframe data, which is fine.
When I eyeball my result in the viewport for non-integer frames, it all looks just fine.

Now, let's try motionblur as that's always the killer of this kind of things, directly rendering the SOP: nothing.

However, if I archive the geometry output of my SOP at $F and $F+shutter, and render that
(either as a DRA or simply with a fileSOP with no time*SOPs attached), I get the proper blur.
I tried this with all the three shutter evaluation modes, and (obviously after changing the archives) it all worked.

What am I missing? Or is this a limitation of PythonSOPs/Soho? A possible bug?

Thanks,
Andras

Good point about the Exchange. Although I'm aware of it, usually I don't spend time keeping myself up to date with recent releases..or actually just think of it when I'm in the need of solving a problem. And I'm sure I'm not the only one with this issue.

If the server side was there, even Houdini could have those feeds integrated in the help easily. There would be an increased awareness and a long term increased contribution to these important tools (forum support and exchange). In an ideal world.

Bring it on

Thanks,
Andras

Hi forum admins,

Would it be possible to add an RSS feed to the forum somehow?
I know this might not be trivial to implement, but I think looking forward to the increased noise ratio that we might be getting with more people coming over to give Houdini a check, an easy to filter/skim through RSS feed might be a good way to keep those busy, more senior people around as well.

Thanks,
Andras

This is still not working..for some reason launching hserver using hservice doesn't seem to propagate the rights properly.

I tried the RUNAS command first, nothing.

Then I tried pstools (psexec) with the following syntax, it didn't help either, hserver still runs as SYSTEM user instead of Renderman (this is 1 line of code)


\\calimero\skynet\psexec \\superjudge -u DOMAIN\Renderman -p Password -i -d -c \\calimero\skynet\applications\houdini\services\hservice -i HoudiniServer “\\calimero\skynet\applications\houdini\services\hserver.exe” -s HoudiniServer


Any clues? Is there any other way to launch hserver without installing it as a service?
What if i write a wrapper in python and use the win32 services module?

If this is not possible, tips of administrating a large amount of Windows machines is also welcome..this hserver thing is bit of a pain in the ass.

Ok, found a simpler way…logging it here just for the sake of completeness.

You can add a post frame script that just appends text (using cat or echo) to the already closed IFD for the given frame.

unix (echo “echo CUSTOMTEXT >>” “csphere.ifd”)

Notes: the first echo is a DOS command, the second echo goes in the IFD and it's a mantra command. Instead of hardcoding the filename, one could use channel referencing and reading the given ROP's “script” attribute (that's why I've split the quotation marks into two groups).

cheers
Andras

Thanks Peter,

You were right, parsing is the easy way..I need to append a line just after ray_quit, that gets logged last, after rendertime.

Now..is there a way to send the IFD stream through a parser automatically? Does pipes and redirection work in the ROP text fields?

(Sorry for the stupid questions just I dont have access to H right now

Thanks RDG for the heads up on the IFD docs, handy.

Hey,

Anyone knows if there is a way to print custom text from an IFD file while processing it?

Mantra logs archive reading logs, process, profiling info..etc, but what I would like (for now, probably more later) is a line at the end of the render saying that it's finished and some custom logging information (for renderfarm database stuff).

Also, is it possible to inject such custom text to a specific location from Houdini (ie..I don't just want it to be at the end of the IFD, but also to be logged at the end of the rendering process)? I've only found camera and object pre and post include.

I know IFDs can contain programming statements, just I'm not too familiar with the format yet, so hints welcome

Thanks,
Andras

Ok, it's fixed..added an additional line calling hserver to set the -S flag thus changing the registry key.

I figured out that initially it was not “remembering” the license server as on the first try there is no running hserver instance, so it can't change the license server.

So the theoretical workflow (just for the log):

1, start hserver as a a service
2, edit the license server once
3, kill hserver
4, startup hserver normally

1-3 only need to happen when license server changes or it's a clean renderbox.

Btw..would it be possible to make an environment variable available? Would result in a cleaner workflow (and I can see others having issues with this)?

Thanks
Andras

Ok, next problem I don't seem to be able to use the -S flag with hservice.
I'm using the following workflow:

All the machines have a drive mapped that stores the applications. When they startup, they run a series of batch files setting up variables then initializing hserver (note the UNC paths that actually turned out to be a path translation problem with hservice.

So first I kill hserver instances left behind:

\\calimero\skynet\applications\houdini\services\hservice -qu HoudiniServer

Then launch a new instance (this is one line of code):


\\calimero\skynet\applications\houdini\services\hservice -i HoudiniServer \\calimero\skynet\applications\houdini\services\hserver.exe -s HoudiniServer


This is where I would have to specify the -S flag, but hservice doesn't take multiple arguments (if i try to pass it as a string it freaks out).

Any ideas? Isn't this possible to store in hserver.ini?

(Also, looks like whatever I set as a license server there is only valid for the given hserver session..is that normal? It's quite strange cause it does change the registry key…i might just overlooked something)

That registry key is probably the last thing I want to rely on.

Thanks,
Andras

ps: I know I'm on unix land, but it's a given