Regarding rendering in Houdini.
Currently, in H15 (15.0303) I´m finding UDIM support a bit limited, f.e.
for all those cases where one
would want to do adjustment stuff to a texture put inside a Cop2net and
then pointing to that in a map slot.
op:obj/cop2net/OUT
The limitiation is that the file import available inside a cop2net
dosn´t provide UDIM extension resolving,
the workaround would be to do the adjustments to the UDIMS as if it was
a sequence (e.g. 1001, 1002, etc)
and then write the results out to file and link those as maps instead.
That´s an extra step that could be seen desireable anyway, depending on
where the hand-off line for assets is
drawn between people/pipeline but still, I would prefer to be able to
keep the adjustments live and quickly
accessible directly from a map input slot, understood at a glance. A
personal preference I guess and not yet
checked against caveats in dependencies for a packaged/exported asset.
All that´s obviously inspired by one of Rohan Dahlvi´s Houdini tutorials
(he´s using that for editing an Hdr for lighting).
--
For general rendering, Mantra really feels like a brother from a
different mother compared to Arnold.
Same quirks when it comes to finding out how Normalmaps are interpreted,
colorspace/tonemapping guesswork needed when
driving stuff like the roughness and even similar types of rendering
artifacts. Indirect bounce noise, gloss/reflect firelies, etc.
One example is driving a roughness in a material with a texture that
hasn´t been clamped a little bit. It´s easy enough to create
fireflies with (ultra)blacks in that texture and end up trying to sample
that away in rendering. Couple that with DOF and you
find yourself using insane levels of pixel samples and noise threshold
to get rid of those fireflies. Won´t work, check your roughness
values, clamp to 0-1 (or 0.1-0.8) and find that you can save hours of
render time...
Like I said, it feels just like Arnold, the same user, the same problems :-)
Cheers,
tim
Am 03.01.2016 um 20:07 schrieb Gerbrand Nel:
Yeah,, not to indie :(
On 03/01/2016 20:27, Jordi Bares wrote:
Ha ha ha….
It is true, we are all getting spoiled by Redshift… but hey! that is
coming to Houdini too!!!
;-)
jb
On 3 Jan 2016, at 19:22, Gerbrand Nel <nagv...@gmail.com> wrote:
Wow.. forgot about this rant :)
It's been about 9 months since I wrote that, and I'm still pretty
happy with houdini.
Only thing I don't like much as a freelancer is Mantra.
Like Jordi said, its probably comparable to Arnold. (I did a fur job
a few months ago, and it was allot faster than Arnold for what we
wanted to do)
Also like Jordi said, you can do some amazing things with mantra,
like distorting uvs with fractals at shader level (this has been
blowing my mind for the last few months)
BUT... I get the feeling Mantra is designed for large productions,
where there is a farm to take the hits.
If you were spoiled by redshift, or octane, be prepared to pull some
hair out.
I render most of my simple jobs through blender (cycles is bloody
awesome!!!), and heavy things with volumes I do in mantra.
This just happened while I was replying to this mail..
https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=42678
Might be worth looking into :)
G
On 02/01/2016 19:27, Tim Leydecker wrote:
Now, to keep that thread alive and because Autodesk is about to
gently push people more
and more into the rental this but don´t own that corner.
I´m currently dabbling with the "Apprentice" Houdini 15 version.
Mostly at the single click level of things. Doubleclicking on a
node still often drives sweat into my hands...
It´s nice that using Physically based rendering and shaders as well
as pretty much anything related
to a first testrendering seems well enough balanced to give a
pleasing result to start with. No gamma issues.
Hit render, it´ll probably look not too shabby with the defaults
already. That helps a lot in the first steps.
But then really getting rid of indirect illumination noise is uhmm,
something different thought.
That´s where Houdini eats CPU power more than I would have expected
actually, indirect bounce cleaning is expensive.
Same for getting volumetric stuff noise free. That stuff sure is
heavy to calculate and indirect bounce noise seems
not too easy to get rid off even with the added controls available
in Houdini 15.
Or maybe my threshold for noise is too low. My personal noise
threshold I mean.
Coming from Arnold, playing with Houdini´s render settings feels
familiar enough, thought.
I like Mantra, even if I find it slow to what I am spoiled with
from Redshift3D.
--
In terms of modeling and doing things inside Houdini, I wouldn´t
want to miss an external asset creation package
to go along with Houdini. Doesn´t matter what, Blender, Modo, Maya,
Softimage, Max, etc.
Just something more focused on asset creation or *.abc cache
generation to be then pulled into Houdini.
I can see myself using Houdini more and more for both first steps
in FX and actual rendering shots.
I like Houdini and the free entry ticket is great, I´ll be
upgrading to the Indie soon. Just for playing.
Cheers,
tim
Am 17.03.2015 um 11:11 schrieb Gerbrand Nel:
I'm not getting anything out of posting this, except knowing I
might save the life of a fellow artist.
So I spent the last year learning Maya, and got to a point where I
can compete against people straight out of collage.
This got me a bit down, as I'm one of the more experienced
softimage artists here in South Africa.
At the end of 2014 I realized that 3D is no longer fun if it all
has to happen in maya for me.
My brain doesn't work the way maya works.
I'm also not much of a clairvoyant, so predicting what I have to
do now, just in case the director asks for something in 2 weeks
from now, lead to allot of back tracking.
At first I decided to learn Maya over houdini because of the price
tag of Houdini FX.
It also seemed like I would exclude myself from bigger projects if
I was one, of only a few houdini artists around.
Houdini indie, and indie engine has completely nullified these
concerns.
The perceived learning curve of houdini was also a bit of a
concern to me.
I started learning houdini 2 months ago, and I can do more with
it, than I can with Maya after a year.
The first few days in houdini is pretty hard, but the whole
package works as one. Once you get your head around its
fundamentals, doing something new is fun and pretty easy.
This might not be true for everyone here, but some of us needs a
non destructive open work flow.
So if you guys haven't tried it yet, and if you are fed up with
the whole "there is a script for that" mentality... there is a sop
for that
G
.
