Hi

I am using Houdini Indie and have a scene that I am rendering but want to have it render on screen and save out the render passes when it is finished. What is the best way to do this ?

I would like to see the image when it is rendering but I am not sure if Mplay saves the passes automatically when it is done.

If I use Render to Disk then I can't see the render and it doesn't always save all the passes and it adds a watermark which I thought was not meant to be present with Indie.

Another thing is that when I render to Mplay and the passes are available from the dropdown, when I try to save them individually it only saves the rgb/colour - is this normal or am I spectacularly inept ?

Any advice/help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

N

I don't know if I can be of help as I am still consider myself a newbie.

But I've only just acquired the indie license and just before I was just learning how to go through the rendering process.

With apprentice I get the watermark but I was really pleased with the rendering results which is the final reason I decided to upgrade to indie.

I'm still in the process of waiting to see if support will convert my hipnc and hdanc files. So I don't know how the watermark issue will workout.

It is my understanding as well that a watermark will not be present. I'll have to wait and see if this happens to myself as well when I re-render my files.

But what I did was render to disk. And no I don't know how you could possibly see the render process as it happens with this process.

A few things I did though.

One was to set scene view to animate in real time with the option to allow frames to be skipped.

I used this part to check for the overall motion of my scene, occasionaly stopping at key frames and looking at the renderview to see what the actual render would look like.

The other is to select the controls button ( I don't know about other rendering process but this is available in the mantra parameters window ) which lets you override the frame range to render to disk.

I used this option to say render maybe 100 frames of a key part of my scene I was interested in looking at but didn't want to wait a long time for the whole file.

When that was done I used MPlays “Load Disk Files…” which let me see the render as what it would look like before exporting to a file format such as .avi or .mov

I don't know about your issue of not saving passes although I do know I had an issue when saving to disk that I found out if I messed around with the file naming convention format and do a render it seemed like it was rendering when in fact it wasn't. Once I cleared that up I no longer had problems.

I did have an issue where say I would render to disk like 2k frames and come back in the morning seeing its “stuck” at a certain frame and not progressing like at frame 1,200 out of 2k. I thought oh, ok maybe my memory is used up so I would set it to 1k frames and only come back to find it stuck at frame 800.

But then I tried aborting the save to disk and restarted the render to disk but this time starting with the frame that it was stuck on ( using the control button to define frame range ).

I was concerned that this being a new render process that in the end would not be able to “stitch” together two different “render sessions” .

But when I brought up MPlay and loaded all the files it did work.

So maybe this is something you could try for some of your missing passes?

I am also wondering, and something I haven't tried. But while rendering to disk maybe open up another session of Houdini/MPlay and “Load Disk Files…” to see the current progress?