Zach Burke

Hey folks. I'm on Houdini 17.0.352 and GameDev Shelf 1.72 running on windows x64. I'm following the simple channel packing pyro tutorial [www.sidefx.com] and am having issues rendering.

When I render, a bunch of .exr's are written, if I open these they look correct. But nothing gets written to the export folder. My rop texture sheet icon gets a little red hashmark background and if I hover over that I see the error message:


…. hours later, I find the solution.

If you go to tree view when you get an error, you can see something as follows.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/jttko0nibgap2cp/houdinitree.JPG [www.dropbox.com]

Every node in red, I'm guessing is a chain where a lower level error was bubbled up. If I go to the lowest red node in the hierarchy, and then hover my mouse or middle-click over the icon of the node, I can see the actual error message. This tells me that I'm trying to render at a restricted resolution because I'm not on a commercial license.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ctfbqn1smoih4k/error%20message.JPG?dl=0 [www.dropbox.com]

I remembered seeing this restriction once I read the message, but it took me a good 2 hours of hunting to find it. Most of that time was spent thinking I had made a basic mistake because I'm still a Houdini newb. I first tried exhausting the following:

• Re-did the tutorial twice
  
• Updated my gamedev tools shelf to latest, tried the tutorial a 3rd time
  
• Opened every pane type, thinking there would be a script output window
  
• Looked through every menu, submenu and option in the preferences menu for anything related to logging and error messages. The only thing remotely related is the notifications panel which gives options to show notifications in the viewport or the status bar.
  
• Tried opening every extra panel from the Windows dropdown, thinking the code and python related ones might contain an output window.
  
• Looked through my houdini variables for a logfile variable definition that I could tail. I didn't find one so I trolled through the Houdini AppData folder, looking for a log but came up empty
  
• I then browsed through the gamedev tools github repo to see if I could match the first error message I had found
  

I later just happened to notice the other red box in the tree view, and then also discovered (while trying to copy the message) that middle-clicking on the box hovers up a larger message window.

As a general piece of feedback, we can probably agree that this UX is not ideal. For an error of this magnitude, user confirmation should be compulsory. I should be made to click an ok box.. the UI is already locked while I'm rendering, may as well finish it off with a modal window containing any chain of log message more severe than Info. It would also be great if I could copy the error text, instead, I'm playing hover-hide-n-seek in order to manually transcribe it. There should absolutely be some kind of Script Output panel that all the messages are piped to, optional filters for warning/error/info would be a bonus.

I've tried to keep this post constructive as difficult as that was. This was a superlatively bad user experience for me as I'm sure it would be for any new user.

I noticed that Houdini had a few errors when trying to compile on 4.18 for ARM64. I fixed these and submitted them in PR #77 [github.com]. I wanted to post here for a historical reference for future surfers.

I'm now running Houdini on my Samsung Tab S2

I have followed this video https://vimeo.com/200396976 [vimeo.com]

I am trying to get this to spit out a texture sheet but its only rendering a single image. I have followed this video 3 times, and am getting frustrated that there is no updated documentation to get the simple stuff working. I cant find a mosaic node either for the old way to do this. I am thinking more and more that I will have to backburner houdini till there are more updates on tutorials to use in conjunction with UE4. It seems most of the tutorials out there are outdated.