jeff mcfall

I have been building a scene with emissive materials and rendering with Karma. In the viewport everything was working correctly, but when it came time to generate an animated sequence I was really stumped as to why my emissive materials were not 'emitting' in the final output render. Using Karma and MaterialX shaders with a geometry parameter connected with emission. After much searching and option clicking I found that I needed to add an 'Extra Render Var' in the Karma Render Settings and include the attribute source name which in my case is 'emitint'. It doesn't seem to matter what parameter/pass name you create or select and I am just outputting a .png sequence. Format is float, Data type is 3f and Source type is Primvar. Not sure if it is the proper way to enable emission but once I did this I was able to get emission to show up in my final renders. What the heck?

Hope this helps anyone who may be experiencing the same issue.

I am sure there is a good reason for this as there always is for all things Houdini. I am wondering why the viewport defaults would be different from the render output defaults or if I am missing something else in my setup ?

Jeff

I have been using Hqueue heavily the past two months. As the sole Houdini user in our facility I do my best to maximize our resources. I have two dedicated render clients and my laptop which I develop on. For what it is worth these are the issues I have struggled with. Would be grateful for helpful insights anyone could offer.

#1. Not an HQ issue but I cant use shared folders on our corporate net. I have to resort to manually copying folders to each machine. Is it possible that I could share Teams/Sharepoint or other folders for the client machines?

#2. With some scenes while generating the usd, the machine accumulates memory and tops out and crashes.
- can this job be restarted at the usd generation level? if I reschedule it seem to restart from the beginning clobbering all of the other frames and likely crashing at the same time location.

#3. it would be REALLY helpful to have more relevant info compressed into the main ui. Most if not all of the relevant job and client info should be available from the main screen. ie being able to see and select which machines are working on a job. Which machine is holding the FX or Engine licenses... Switching between the client and job ui are cumbersome and slow as well as not conveying relevant job info.

#4 Licensing. I have an FX license and only recently went to the web license mode which is a HUGE HUGE help. With my current problem from issue #1 I need for each machine to generate its own usd file for Karma rendering but often a machine seems to keep its FX license even though it is only doing the Karma job and I have to manually release it. Ugh. Again the license details would be great to have in the main Ui of Hqueue.

As with most of my Houdini questions I am often humbled by how simple the workflow or solution can be.
Apologies for the long thread. Just looking for workflow suggestions and insights.


JeffMc

I have Hqueue up and running. If a job fails part way through, is there a way to restart it and have it not clobber the existing valid files in the frame sequence? I am referencing both the .usd generation and Karma rendering. thank you Jeff