ispep

I've been following the quick tutorial on the SideFX website that links to a vimeo video explaining 'god rays' in houdini; https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/quicktip-light-beams-through-volumes-god-rays/ However at one point he rotates the camera to avoid looking directly at the box volumes edge because it renders with some funny banding effects. Is there really no other option than that? I tried using a tube but that's worse. I'm thinking it's kind of limited for animations if you have to hide or avoid the edges somehow but like the effect.

Don't want to send you off in the wrong direction but; digital tutors has a tutorial on a statue that crumbles over time from the top downwards and the destructible area (if I remember) is determined by an animated collider (a sphere). It floats over the glue constraint network or something like that. It might be worth a look.

tightvnc is another free one. I've used teamviewer/tightvnc/chrome remote desktop myself and they all do the job, but its not perfect by any means.

I'm trying to get to grips with using PTEX from mudbox to Houdini, I've exported my paint layer and used a mantra shader builder with a texture node to render out the result below but as you can see it doesn't work. Could anyone help please.

For those of us who view this as magic is there a HIP file for h14 with a simple scene that I can play around with? Or is it as simple as dropping in a Disney BRDF (cvex) node in a material shader builder? I did that, and whilst renders out lovely, if I crank metallic up it takes forever to render anything.

I have a bunch of wires I'd like to place a sleeve around where they bunch up together (so it essentially looks like one big wire). ----\ / ------ ---- ============== ------ ----/ \ ------ ...if that makes any sense? I have the wire geometry which is just a polywire from a curve, and I'm guessing you object merge them into another piece of geometry to use as the basis of building the sleeve, but am a bit lost as to how I would selectively isolate parts of the wire(s) and how to generate the sleeve itself. Any help or tips would be greatly appreciated. One way I've managed to get something really ugly, but I suppose passable is by; but this requires me to go in and delete the geometry I don't need, and isn't procedural in nature. Also, I'm thinking it's not very efficient but what do I know..

I have a part with many primitive groups and it would be good to be able to visualise the groups in the viewport instead of having to manually find what refers to what by stumbling around with the delete sop. Any ideas? Ok so there's a way of doing this by using the select tool and choosing groups in the context menu above, a list then appears to the right and everything is color coded.

What does this mean ...it pops up in the houdini console when doing some mplay renders.

Real noob question I'm sure, I just want to rig something simple like this; *forgive the drawing it's bad Where if you push the middle block down/up the two connections move with it, but stay connected to their respective side blocks, essentially rotating around the circles. Im trying to do it with simple parenting since it's mechanical but come unstuck with the secondary rotation of the two connections and how you could simplify the process of animimating it as one (i,e, move the middle block up and down and the others follow with regards to their constraint).

ah I suppose that's one way of doing it, yeah, thanks.

I have a object composed of several parts and need certain elements of it to rotate around a particular point, to that end I split the file into their separate components (give them each a group name) and manually moved the pivot of each using a separate transform node to where each should rotate. However if I try transforming it further down the chain of nodes (following a MERGE node) with another transform node the pivot is no longer respecting those previous changes. Simply entering $CEX/y/z results in it centering the pivot on the element but not where I wanted it. Does that make sense? Cheers! I am trying to transform the pieces individually by group, but I think the merge node stops this?

If I want to move the pivot of an object to a particular place how can I freeze it? Using a transform sop and manually inputting values the pivot information is lost further down the chain? I'm used to being able to manually modify the position of the pivot of an object and having that stick so am I wrong in thinking that's how it works in Houdini too and therefore I'm doing something wrong?

Just curious as to whether it's possible to use the mantra command line to render over the network a sequence of IFD's. I can get this cmdline stuff to work but not hqueue, but it's just one image from a sequence, is there an obvious way around this?

*groan* Thanks for help guys, I should know better than to render without saving - what makes it worse is I forgot what I did. Whoops.

I should have saved it but stupidly made a mistake and forgot as it was sitting in the background whilst I did something else - is there a way of recovering the hip file from what the renderer used previously? Somewhere in my brain is telling me it exports a copy of the hip somewhere to use for rendering. Will that still exist? I need that copy but can't think where it would be.