John Andress

They do render as a png with alpha here.

If you want to see the alpha channel in mplay press the alpha channel button below the image (or hotkey 4).

You have the render rop Override Output image set to "ip", which will send the renders to Mplay and will not save them to the directory you specified in the settings node. If you want the files on disk (other than wherever mplay caches them) you would then need to save them from the Mplay menu bar.

Instead of that you may want to scroll down a bit to the husk > monitor > enable mplay monitor, that way if you hit render to disk the files will actually be saved where you wanted them, but mplay will monitor the render.


Also, you may want to take a look at your project directory structure.

Where you see $HIP in a save or load path, that is a reference to the location of the current hip file, so houdini is looking to save your output image in a subdirectory /Documents/blender projects/Goofertons projects/houdini projects/snowman/ located next to your hip file, (not in your users documents folder, which you may be expecting.)

I think apprentice licenses have to renew monthly, are you able to render a cube or something in a test scene? If so it doesn't sound like licensing.

If I open the file as is and render to mplay it renders without errors an empty scene with the sky background (though there are some warnings in the log viewer.) If I turn off the layer save path you have set on the two geometry import nodes ($HIP/Documents/blender projects/Goofertons projects/houdini projects/rgwASRBRVS etc) then it renders with the snowman and wall. Do those directories exist on your system?

The only bidirectional capable path tracer for houdini that comes to mind is Renderman.