hi guys,

does anyone else have mantra crashes with extra image planes?

whenever i add a new plane and render to file (.picnc or .exr) mantra crashes without any log message. rendering to ip works fine.

i did a test with a new scene, here's steps to reproduce. it always happens for me.
- create a sphere and a camera (sphere is optional actually)
- a mantra node
- set output pictur to anything, e.g. $HIP/test.picnc
- add an extra plane (variable ‘Af’, type ‘Float Type’, channel name ‘A’)

hit render and crash. i get windows dialog saying the crash happens in libimg.dll

this is with apprentice HD 9.5.209 and 9.5.219 windows 32bit VC8

i can't check with any older versions now, but it used to work before..

i attached a hip file, i would appreciate it if anyone could check and confirm this

You're trying to write alpha to the alpha channel(Af -> A), which already happens by default. I guess Houdini doesn't like you touching that. If you change the output layer name to ‘foobar’, it works fine.

Cheers,

J.C.

wow,i guess i just never stumbled across that than, thanks a lot! got the same reply from support

btw, the reason i did this was to examine the alpha channel when rendering to ip.

why doesn't it show up there by default, but get's rendered to files by default?

I believe it's an optimization thing. Not sure if there's a workaround…

Cheers,

J.C.

Alpha is there in rendered images, it's just packed into the color as RGBA. Pressing ‘a’ will view the alpha plane, as will clicking on the alpha component of the channel selector.