melazoma

We just use RV these days. Granted the annotation features have their limitations, but they work fine for our purpose.

Yes, free (as in not being used) Houdini (FX/non-FX) licenses can also be used as hbatch licenses on the farm. Also note that while Houdini (non-FX) licenses are unable to create or change any DOP/POP/Houdini FX-specific nodes in GUI mode, when used as a hbatch license, it can be used to perform any tasks Houdini FX is capable of including DOP/POP sims. So by day a Houdini license is a seat for the junior artist, and by night it doubles as a full-blown sim/render license running heavy-load processes which you usually don't want to run in the GUI anyways. Quite the value if you ask me.

Not exactly. It depends on which program(s) you run on the node on the farm and how you run it. Case 1: Generate the ifd files from a hip file in either houdini (interactive) or hbatch. The ifd generation process can also be run on a server node using hbatch. Server node is assigned a mantra rendering task, in which the "mantra" program needs to be given an ifd file. In this case, the process only uses a mantra render token during the render. This is generally easier to manage from a render farm wrangling perspective because you can assign 1 frame of ifd per server node, which can make load-balancing (manually or automatically) and error recovery easier. Case 2: Skip ifd generation. Server node is assigned a hbatch task, in which hbatch is given a hip file and instructed to render 1 or several ROP nodes. Images are rendered directly as if using an interactive houdini session without the graphical UI. In this case, the process uses a hbatch license and a mantra render token during the render. While this allows you to render images directly, hbatch (essentially houdini itself) has to evaluate the node network(s) leading up to the render ROP, so the complexity of your networks may impact your total progress time of your render.

bloomendale showed the way to source color from multiple frames here: http://forums.odforc...ms/#entry107545 In addition to this, I also put in dark_cry's suggestion to gas blur the Cd fields. The latest result is here and the hip file attached. Cache the sim in import_pyro_fields and render. emitSmokeFromTexture03.hip

That's been my experience so far as well. However as of the version I used for our last job, the Exocortex Maya Alembic plugin only exported point positions without velocity or other attributes. So we just calculated velocity with a Trail SOP. Hopefully attributes on particles from Maya will be supported soon.

Without an example hip file, it's hard to say for sure. But is does your cube have any divisions greater than 1? The Paint node allows you to paint per-point, so if you have very low or no divisions on your cube the painted color would get stretched / interpolated to the closest neighboring point.

Hi ryew, thanks for helping out. I should have cleaned the file before uploading. Given enough hardware power, I'd like to take a stab at something a little more elaborate, but my 3 years old MacBook Air was enough for this little exercise.

Give this file a try. This should shows the basic idea to add color (Cd.x/Cd.y/Cd.z) to your smoke sim and advect it. edit: re-uploaded hipnc file. emitSmokeFromTexture.hipnc

If you don't mind my saying, your scene is a little too stripped down to test any potential solutions. 1 frame of locked & reduced particles & character mesh would do. One way to delete points inside (or outside) an object is to turn the object into a volume with Iso Offset and give it a name (like 'density' or 'blah'), then use AttributeFromVolume on your particles to transfer the 'presence' of the object onto the particles. Then you are free to delete particles with this attribute. See attached file. deleteParticlesInVolume.hip

Hi Nick, thank you for the tip on iso-adaptivity. While the rings have not completely gone away, I was able to make it less obvious by setting it to 0.001.

If you mean deleting all points except the first and the last in a polyline, how about in a Blast SOP's Group parameter, enter: 1-`npoints("../" + opinput(".", 0))-2`

Hi all, I'm in a bit of a pickle, and it'd be great if anyone can offer some insight on this. I have a FLIP sim being meshed with the new VDB meshing workflow, and I am getting a ringing pattern in the vdb sdf volume after the vdbsmoothsdf operation has been applied. I am trying to get rid of the ringing as it is passed onto the mesh resulting from convertvdb and ends up in the final render. The FLIP sim used a Particle Separation of 0.3 and resulted in ~1.3 million FLIP particles packed tightly in a 4x4x4 unit (meter) space with no open holes, etc. The VDB SDF Smooth operation uses Gaussian with filtering voxel radius = 2 and iterations = 4. This is meant to be a very smooth liquid--like hot chocolate. The results from other smooth methods (Laplacian Flow, etc) were not smooth enough. I have tried to increase the smooth radius and iterations, but it seems the more I increase these values the ringing gets worse. I also tried to set vdbfromparticle above vdbsmoothsdf to over-sample by reducing Voxel Size to 0.006 (instead of the default 0.3/2 = 0.15), and then turn up the smoothing. This made the ringing significantly finer, but the artifact still remains visible in the smoothed sdf. I'm sorry for posting all this details without a hip file. I will try to post an isolated example tomorrow as I only have the production file at the moment. But has anyone run into this problem in the past or is dealing with it right now? Thanks in advance for any help offered.

Instead of sourcing the houdini_setup script from what appears to be you home directory, try: cd /opt/hfs12.1.125/ source houdini_setup[/CODE] I'm pretty sure you need to be in the hfs-* directory to properly source the environment.

In my last fire job I got a lot of details out of the displacement component of Pyro shader. You need to tweak it, and more importantly, you need to enable Rest and Dual Rest fields with you sim so the displacement noise will stick to your fluid.

Oh and and guess what Autodesk is about to release... 2014!