Georgie

Haha, well, you're welcome I've been lurking on odForce for years now, it's no biggie to drop a post once in a while when people ask about V-Ray. All the best, bud!

Haha, well, marketing guys promised they'll try to think of something. As to the custom AOVs - it's now supported. You can even isolate the AOV to specific primitives inside an instance hierarchy(e.g. agents) using attributes. We kind of forgot about it, and nobody asked during the Beta. All the best!

No installation, only a bat file that is used to set up the environment and launch Houdini. 16.5 support is not available yet - maybe in a couple of weeks.

It is altho it's still in development. Send an email to support@chaosgroup.com and they'll provide you with access to the nightlies. https://github.com/ChaosGroup/vray-for-houdini

The bounding box shows up because you're in Wire Shaded mode. Press Shift+W.

Drop a Rest VOP or drop a Bind, set it to Vector and type in rest in the name field.

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You can always drop a Polyframe SOP to add the curve's tangent as a normal, cross that with a 0,1,0 vector to get a vector pointing towards the 'inside' of the curve and use an intersect to move the points to your trunk's geometry. I'm not entirely certain what you're after and I'm in no way knowledgeable of plants but maybe doing that and then messing with the L-System would give you nice results ? btw, http://ivy-generator.com/ I think it's worth mentioning this awesome little program

Use an Attribute VOP instead of a VOPSOP ; when you dive inside, at the bottom of the global variables block there are 4 brown file inputs that point to the inputs of your AttribVop node. In other words - it's easier - you don't need to promote the file parameters on your PC Open VOPS - you just hook them to the corresponding file input on the global variables.

^Windows 10 aka #theNSAareTotallyNotFundingThis

Not sure what you're asking - are you talking about RAM or HDD space ? If it's the former - try restarting Houdini before you commit to your final resolution sim. Or render through the command line. When it comes to HDD space, there are a couple of things you can do to minimize the usage - use .bgeo.sc files ; don't write out fields that you will not be using (ex; importing temperature out of a simple smoke sim that you're intending to render as is); delete attributes that you don't need before writing to disk. And of course you can create a folder on your HDD to use for writing out data and point the ROP to it . Fields and particle sims tend to pump out a lot of data tho. 200 frames could easily go to 50 gigs for a relatively simple sim. And that's coming from me - just a home user. I can totally imagine the fancy stuff on Vimeo being into the 100's of gigabytes.

I'd make my displacement map in Photoshop/ Zbrush / whatever then in Houdini, I'd define a point attribute to use as a bias in my displacement shader. You can animate that point attribute, define it based on a bounding box / velocity and so on ; even multiply it against a noise that changes over time. I think making the displacement maps would be the tough part; what you need to do in Houdini is quite straightforward. I've attached a very simple scene just to explain myself better. Obviously you can also blend between different surface models to get the metallic vs skin material as shown in the pictures. Really cool project Can't wait to see some WIPs ! disp.hipnc

no idea what mread does, I use hbatch then I navigate to the file I want to render hbatch myFile_001.hip cd /out ls (to list the nodes) render myRopNetwork or w/e the node name is you can also type ' help render ' to get a list of flags

Cody's already answered your question but I wanted to mention something else. It'd be easier if you check out the file dops.hipnc

Notice the Use Template Attrs is ticked on on the Copy SOP edit; Actually is that what you're looking for or do you want the entire texture to be mapped to every single piece of geo ? I'm sorry, I guess I'm just confused ? template.hipnc