instance lights to particles --> crashing my houdini

[itriix]

Hi everyone, i followed the forums and had watched PQ's light instancing to particles vimeo video. I got it all set up like he had but it crashes houdini every time i render. most of the rendered frames come out as "bad" images, with half of it not rendered or something of the sort... then it just crashes.

however, if i just render to mplay by hand a single frame, it renders no problem. it's only when i use the mantra render node.

things i've tried:

changed tile size from 64 to 16

turned on and off use max processors, set threads to 1, 2, 3, 4

if i render the rest of the scene but turn off the geometry that deals with the point light instances, it renders all the way through. but if i turn on that geometry, then it crashes. so it definitely has to do with the light instancing. or some aspect of it i think.

anyone have ANY possible ideas?

(and on a different but related note, i created my particle network, created my light template, mantra point light, mantra shadow and referenced them in the light template, then used the shelf tool INSTANCE, pointed to my particles, selected my light template, AGREED to allow it to modify geometry for point instancing and then that's it. well, now since there is an "instance" pop and the geo is doing point instancing... i can't actually RENDER the particles. for the time being i just created a DUPLICATE popnet in a diff geo node, and render that, but that seems highly inefficient. i'm lost on the workflow. but how can i use just ONE popnet, for both the light instancing AND particle rendering???? i can't figure out how to "pull out the particles" into another geo node)

thanks,

Jonathan

Edited April 25, 2010 by itriix

[itriix]

hmmm, seems like the problem has to do with the a combination of the cache node and using the instance shelf tool... when i created an instance object and built my particle network inside of that, i was able to get the sequence to render a bit longer before it crashed. and then i noticed my "cache" node, was set to 1 to 300... but my sequence was starting from 261 to 375... it seemed to crash at 300. so i fixed this. and it rendered all the way through, but crashed on the last frame. i also noticed there was 2 bad frames at 299 and 300. so i re-rendered them from 298 - 300... then when i reloaded the sequence, NOW 298 was a bad frame, as well as 299... so i deleted all three of them. and tried 297-300... that time 297, and 300 were bad! so i duplicated 296... and 301... and rendered from 296 - 301... this time they all rendered all the way!

okay, so strange behaviour but at least it worked

anyone know or have ideas why?

J

[ikarus]

wouldnt it be easier to just use a point cloud as basis for illumination data based on all those points you have for instancing?