Batch Render

[Nico D.]

Hi,

It is possible to make batch rendering from command line like XSI does?

[stevenong]

Hi gaucho,

Check out the hrender command in the command shell. You can also daisy chain multiple ROPs with Houdini 8.0 now so you can batch render in Houdini itself.

Cheers!

steven

[Nico D.]

I found "hrender" file in houdini's "bin/" directory, and it has not any file extension, Im runing Houdini under windows, maybe that script runs on linux systems ?

Hscript looks very powerfull, I would like to see more information and examples to take advantages of it.

[stevenong]

Hi gaucho,

Go to Start -> Programs -> Side Effects Software -> Command Shell then type in hrender for the options. You should be able to create a batch file & run it through the shell. Again, there's nothing special about hrender that you can't do from Houdini.

To learn more about hscript, go through the Scripting help documentation.

Questions: what are you comparing hscript to? Or what do you think it will do for you that the interface can't?

Cheers!

steven

[sibarrick]

Batch rendering can be as simple or as complex as you like with houdini,

as Steve says at it's simplest you can link a bunch of render nodes together save the file, open it hscript and type render "myrender" and away you go.

You can also put them in a render subnet and do the same thing, so just render them straight from the gui.

Then again you can write a load of hscript to source files and run renders and all sorts. Couple that up with python and you can write an entire render farm....

all depends how far you want to go with it.

[deecue]

also, pretty much every rop has both pre and post frame/render script entries.. (all except i3d.. never understood that one..) but before 8, i typically did that for multiple passes.. launched hscript and rendered the first rop on the list.. after one was done, it just passed on to the very next..

[Nico D.]

Thanks for all replys!!

Questions: what are you comparing hscript to? Or what do you think it will do for you that the interface can't?

Im comparing hscript to windows command line. I always render using batch files rather than using the interface...; some times scripting is more powerfull than an interface, but Houdini is atypical, you can do a lot of thing using node structures, in XSI I must create scripts to resolve some tasks than are imposible to resolve without script.

One thing than I dont understand is How to create an run scripts externally. I would like to create my scripts in a text editor an run it from hscript for example.

Then again you can write a load of hscript to source files and run renders and all sorts. Couple that up with python and you can write an entire render farm....

Sounds very very cool...

[sibarrick]

I'm sure it's in the help somewhere but basically you just write a bunch of hscript commands into a text file and then just source it straight into hscript in a command window.

so say your render script is a text file called render.cmd and your hip file is called myhip.hip then to run it open a command shell ( "houdini command line tools" for windows is a good place to start) navigate to where you hip file is and type this

hscript myhip.hip<render.cmd

that will run hscript load your hip file and execute the commands in the render.cmd.

if you want to exit hscript after the render add these two lines to the end of your render.cmd file

quit

y

you can of course put the line "hscript myhip.hip<render.cmd" in a bat file along with other commands and you have the makings of a simple batch render script. Python is more powerful than dos so I would recommend it or one of the other scripting languages if you want to get more complex with things.

hope that helps a little

[edward]

BTW, one also just do:

hscript myhip.hip render.cmd

It will load the files in the command line argument order, running .cmd files as it sees them.