Ashraf Hassan

Hi Everyone,

I would like to ask for help with the new Metahuman for Houdini plugin/workflow.
I noticed the animated maps (after animated the head with it's sliders )are working only in the viewport , but not under Solaris/Karma.
When I use SOP create to build up Metahuman the datas are written to the primvars:material_override as one string, containing the params and their values.
Is there an easy way to connect(and tokenize)these values to their respective shader parameter (through Edit Properties node or something like that)to drive the shader with the animated maps? Now it is not renderable only the default maps are visible on the Metahuman heads.

Thanks in advance,

Ashraf

Hi !

I had some problem with uv-baking function with displacement+mantra,and from odforce i get some advice to use true-displace off rendering parameter. It works but i encountered other problems so i include my post from odforce,maybe someone can give me some answer.:

For getting the correct shadowed shading it is a difference between the displaced and the “bumped”(true displace off) versions.
We try to implement our custom mentalray shader into mantra which has an SSS buffer.Unfortunately it needs all the correct shadowing info from the current scene,without it it is will be biased from the diffuse shading pass producing compositing artifacts.I attached a sample picture how does it looks right now under mentalray, it shows how “sharp” could be the sss data at the shadow border regions.

example:
sss_samle.jpg


back to the true displacement problem here is another pic ,it shows that the shadows came from the base object which is not displaced.
This uv baked data is used in other passes for the sss so the shadow won't be correct in the final sss pass.Is there any option to get it work with true displacement?


shadow_difference.jpg

other interesting thing is some camera clipping issue in uv baking which i thought is camera independent.


camera_clipping.jpg

I read some post before that the surface shader should handle both back/front normals. This shader i used has this solution(isFrontFace) for the illumination loop.
Am i missed somethig?(is there any auto clipping optimalization in mantra?, sorry i'm not very familiar with the rendering options in mantra).

thanks in advance,

Ashraf

Thanks for the reply.

The problem is that i would like to use this baked stuff not for texturing purposes but for a prepass for my shading network.

I would like to implement our existing shader into mantra/from mentalray/ but it needs a prepass/like lightmap generation in mray/.
This prepass is actualy a texture bake into uv space,but it needs to contain all the detail of the object:displace,normals,lights,some of the shading maps….
Without those the shader could not get the right data in the second pass./i used 2 mantra node connected to each other, first the “baking” the second is the final render ./

So what i tried to get is a simple mentalray like lightmap pass wich runs on all the necessary objects and bakes every surface data back into some map.