choimation

jason_iversen
Oddly enough, my laptop continually crashes with a ZeroCfgSvc upon login, but not my desktop at home which has about all the same software. I've been wondering what the hell ZeroCfg is. I have seen some wireless network card driver with a “Zero Config” option before, but not on my machine.

<later>
Ah yes, doing a search on Google reveals a few mentions of ZeroConfig and wireless adapters. I'm going to search more tomorrow on this myself.

Yes it is my wireless trying to access the internet. For some reason it was all working fine until I installed Houdini. Does houdini continually try to access the internet?

Thanks,
Christian Choi

mtucker
Wow, thanks very much for that. It's great to hear that kind of excitement!

As for your question about Apprentice and Renderman/Mentalray, we exclude those features from Apprentice because we have no way to enforce the watermarking of images created with those renderers. So if we did allow apprentice users to output to rman, there would be nothing to stop them using the free version of Houdini to do real production work (as long as they use rman as their renderer).

Mark

Ahh I understand. There is no post procces that will stamp the watermark. I was trying to learn Mantra last night and a wierd thing happened.

I know I should probably report this to the bug area but speaking of renderers, nothing would render, it would come up with a message saying renderer is closed or something like that with standard vex shaders.

I had just installed the latest version, I didn't uninstall the old version (320), maybe this is the problem.

The other thing that keeps happening is that my Visual Studio 2005 Beta wantss to debug zfcgsvr.exe or something like this when I try to launch the renderer or when my computer first boots up. I think this is the licence trying to access the sidefx site. This problem has been happening ever since I installed the first version but happens when I try to render in the latest version.

Any thoughts?

Just a couple of small things but the software is truly awesome. I love the copy function, I'm trying to figure out what to put in the stamp area to get cool fractaled copies. I love the fact that this software is so deep you can create some unbelievable stuff just with copy and fractal.

Thanks again guys,
Christian Choi
The Choimation Image Factory, Inc.
http://www.choimation.com [choimation.com]

I just wanted to express my gratitude for giving me and others the opportunity to learn Houdini Master 8.

I'm at a loss for words for how powerful and incredible Houdini is. It breaks all other platforms boundaries with regards to power, speed, and features, in my humble opinion. The elegance of the UI and networks/procedural approach to building things is sick (Overly Brilliant). Being able to so easily build new modules and reuse your procedurals is much easier than building MEL scripting interfaces that do the same sort of things. Clicking and dragging editable parameters as well as being able to assign the levels of input to your subnetworks is the icing on the cake.

You guys have really done it, Keep up the astounding work.

Oh and BTW, offering such unrestricted access to your top shelf product in the way of an apprentice program is very very smart marketing and not to mention a good detourant to piracy. Having the power of Houdini Master 8 and being able to explore such a powerful program, even make demo reels, really sets you guys apart from many other 3d platforms. More companies should follow suit with their top shelf versions of software so users can learn the powerful features of their software, you have been the first and I'm really glad that I happened to stumble across this unbelievable software. Needless to say, I've set aside XSI and Modo, which I recently purchased, and have been obsessed with Houdini ever since I stumbled accross it.

I do have one question, are the renderman and Mental ray features not included in the master apprentice version? If so, why not just include them also? I mean what would be the harm? The ability to build shader networks in Renderman and Mental ray is a huge part of the rendering and lighting workflow in today's environment. Since you have already unleashed the power of the rest of the features of the software, why not include this also (If it is not included already)? By no means is this a complaint or rant, I'm extremely gratefulo for what you have included to be evaluated.

I can only speculate that it must be a licensing thing. RM and MR must be the inhibitor to including this in master8 apprentice if it isn't already included. If it is included and I'm just being an idiot, how do I get it to work?

Anyhow, congratulations on a brilliant piece of software and thank you for making it available to all of us to explore and learn. Houdini will finally be demystified. You all have done an unbelievable job.

Lastly, I'm quite surprised that Houdini has been such a mysterious and daunting platform for so long, I really foresee it becoming the leader of the pack and hope that it does. Perhaps it already is.

Thank you again for a great product.

Christian Choi
The Choimation Image Factory, Inc.
http://www.choimation.com [choimation.com]