priel

hi , i have the same problem and i think alot of others would have encounter this problem too. What i did to solve it is to increase the hair length slightly and it will finish the render . Downloaded your scene file and i just increase the hair length from 6 to 6.1 and it solve the problem . Hope it help you , cheers

Thanks John, appologies for the late reply. We ended up promoting a start hit frame and a end hit frame, so the user can enter it manually. Works ok. Cheers! Peter.

Hi, We're trying to set up a system that emitts a known amount of particles over a certain period of time (to be preciese,-the amount of frames that an object goes thru a plane or floor in our case). Right now we are using $HITTIME to birth the particles when the emitter hits the "floor". However, this is not working as slick as we would have liked, since one has to manually calculate the amount of frames the object hits the floor, and then divide the total amount of particles we want with that number of frames,... so that not all the particles are generated at the first hittime event. Is there any way to calculate the amount of frames that hits are generated before hand, so we could automate this in the source pop? Cheers, Peter.

Hi Jason, yeah lot's of locked geometry.. no otls. I know it's not advisable to lock the geometry like that.. but the cooking took to long and it was much faster once it was locked. City shot, tons of buildings. We probably should have bgeo'd it out and then brought it in, but since there was like 10 different takes it all got a bit messy in the end. We're still learning here, and learnt a few lessons regarding the initial planning of a houdini workflow. Regarding the backup dir variable... was more out of curiosity.. thought I've stumbled on some obscure bug or something Peter

Hi, thanks for the answers, but it's not what I was refering to. I was playing around with the HOUDINI_BACKUP_DIR variable, in a attempt to minimize network traffic created by hip backups. If I'm working on a 80 meg hip file, and have it auto 'backing-up' to the same folder the original hip file is in (which is default, HOUDINI_BACKUP_DIR=. ), unessecary network bandwidth is used. So I tried to alter it, and set it to: $HOME/hbackup, which should tell the auto save feature to save ALL backups into my local /hbackup directory. This works fine if my source hip file is somewhere local, like in $HOME or $HOME/Desktop... it does not work however when the file is residing on a NFS share (/mnt/projects/whatever/ for instance). Maybe I'm missing something? Cheers, Peter.

Using the HOUDINI_BACKUP_DIR string in the environment does not seem to work if your scene file in on a NFS mounted drive.. works ok if saved in $HOME or locally. Anyone else have this problem? The warning dialog you get is: "Failed to backup file /xxx/xxx/xxx.hip to file xxx.bak1.hip" Peter

Just saw Cars from Pixar, really amazing work on the car shaders! ...so... ..how about a nice car shader, with all the goodies such as candy specks, clear laquer on top etc.. I figure since all the other render engines always p1mp their car shaders, why not mantra Peter.

actually... never mind, the rsl-mode was quick to hack. Sorry! Peter

Hi, quick question. Does anyone know if there is a 'mantra' mode available for emacs? I guess one could be hack from the rsl-mode file, but thought I'd ask here first. Cheers, Peter.

Hey, this one got me stumped for a long time.. why wouldn't it be possible to texture your low-poly model and have the subd respect the edges properly? This is a common workflow in other packages. A bug report has been filed and acknowledged by sesi, but looking thru their journals and trying out the latest build, no fix yet. Isn't this a VERY important feature? Or does all the big houses use Maya to model and texture in, in wich case this problem might not appear? To me this would be a major pain if used in production. UV Texturing at level 1 can be really painfull if 0 stage is already fleshed out quite a bit... Cheers, Peter

hey, we just merged our mantra specific code into the main trunk of drqueue, so should show up soon in the more recent releases. It renders ifds, but we're working on a hrender profile too... soon ready. It's just that hrender needs a seperate license as far as I understand it... writing out ifd files from houdini and then network rendering those are the way to go if u dont have that. Peter.

Hey, Got some help on #odforce, aracid gave me a suggestion using blend sop, and a few rigs. I have set something up, it ain't pretty but kinda works. Horrible to work with under a deadline tho. Was wondering if someone could have a look at it and give me a suggestion on how to constrain the control rig (green color) to the mocap rig, but still allow for key editing. I've attached a bunch of padded bvh files too (all public domain / our own). It's a kludge... i know... Any feedback appreciated, Peter mocap.tar.gz

Oh, forgot to mention that I just had a look at handles sop/chop, very cool, I can imagine building a stand alone rig and have the goals look at the mocap data nulls... but again, I'm unable to edit by hand, the rotation channels are overriden and I can't seem to find a way to work around this.. Any feedback appreciated... Peter

Hi All, We've been scratching our heads for quite some time now regarding importing biovision files into houdini. I've tried using mcbiovision and all it's different options to create the bones hierachy and bclip motion, however, it's giving me mixed results. Scaling of bones completely off the chart, bones hierarchy jumbled, some bones attached wrongly, usualy the clavicle / spine bones. The motion (bclip) comes in ok, but has issues. Placing a transform behind it, and exporting that seems to fix this...I got no clue why... just something I read on this forum. I know bvh file format lists their axis in YXZ (http://www.cs.wisc.edu/graphics/Courses/cs-838-1999/Jeff/BVH.html) maybe that has something to do with it. Ok, so I guess in a clinch we could massage the bones heirarchy and bclip motion to fit somehow (it sucks tho coz we need to reskin the character and blending over to another motion clip would be a battle in itself... ) Once the character is setup, and the motion applied, how do I regain some sort of manual override control of it all? All my rotations in IK (or FK or whatever I export with the mcbiovision) are overridden by chops... gawd why is it sooooooooooooooo difficult and cryptic.......... :| Peter

DaJuice: Thanks so much for the example file, I had a quick look earlier and it looks perfect for what I need to do! I'll dig in and dissect now, fun fun sibarrick: Thanks for your suggestions, but you're waaaay ahead of me, I'll come back once I know how to respond We do have the 101 dvd, and I'll watch it again tomorrow. Thanks! Peter