Howitzer99

If you have access to Redshift, their lights support uv wrap and mirroring for projected textures. Maybe there is a way to tile the texture in COPs before using as a projection in Mantra?

Definitely try the Redshift demo first before jumping in. I run it off my laptop when needed, which has a nvidia 980 card, and it works pretty good, but it is a few generations newer than the 6xx cards.

For volumes, usually you need to adjust the RS_Volume shader settings to work with the incoming volume. There are obviously a lot that can vary between volume setups, but to get started, the main ones would be the Scatter Coefficient and the Absorption Coefficient. With Big Hammer being the Shadow Density Scale in the Advanced tab. It looks like you're already getting some shading in your render, so hopefully tweaking these parameters will help. If you want to send along a hip file and a single-frame cache (vdb) I could look further.

Very nice, thanks for forwarding, looking forward to all the upcoming changes to RS/Houdini!

I am not sure how you would do this directly from Houdini, but you could look into using xNormal to generate maps. Export your hi-res model, and a low-res version, then in xNormal, it will create height and normal maps. The are a lot of baking options, so worth going through a few youtube tutorials to understand the process, I've linked one below. If you are not familiar with Houdini, you could use any software to generate the low-res model from, or even for laying out the UVs before baking. https://xnormal.net/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGszEIT4Kww Cheers, Howitzer

It's probably to try and keep the instance calculations light, which makes sense, especially if you're talking about a large number of instanced objects (forest of trees, a horde army, etc). Any overrides would need to change the baked values in the proxy object, as apposed to reading them directly from the rs proxy file, which could get expensive in some scenes.

(I was just about to "send", when I saw you'd replied. I'll hit send in case it helps anyone in the future.) If you set an Override User Data on the proxy node, you're example will work. You need to enable this on the Redshift_Proxy node, or else it will only read data from the proxy itself, and not local overrides. The same is tryue for visibility, matte, and the other options in the screen shot. Overall, RS Proxies are turning out to be very well implemented, and a big time saver when bouncing between packages! Cheers, Howitzer

If you're in Houdini, you can open a Shell (Windows->Shell), which is basically a shell that includes Houdini environment settings. From there, you can run iinfo, and whole mess of other useful scripts, regardless of which directory you're in. Meaning, you don't have to move your files anywhere special to run.

Hi jon, Sorry, I can't seem to find the website I'd used a last year to generate luts with. Try searching for "conversion luts", since you're trying to convert an image format and not apply a filmic look. Cheers, Howitzer

For squeezing, you will need to change both the resolution and the pixel aspect ratio to properly squeeze an image. You'll need to use the reciprocal of the aspect ratio to reduce the width of your output resolution. For example: Say your final output resolution is 1920x1024, and the anamorphic aspect ratio is 1.422. The reciprocal is 0.703 (1 / 1.422). Multiplying that by the width returns 1352 (1920 * 0.703). In the camera's setting you would put: Resolution: 1352, 1024 Pixel Aspect Ratio: 1.422 To unsqueeze the rendered image, multiply the width by 1.422 to return to a standard HD frame size. In the images below, the left is the sequeezed (rendered), and the right is the unsqueezed (in comp). Hope this helps, Howitzer

From looking at the video, it does appear that the wall of swatches are all using the same hdri for lighting (similar highlights for each sphere), so maybe that's it? The lookups for environment lighting are based on an infinite sphere, so a small change in position wouldn't be a noticeable as with traditional lighting.

I'm running Houdini with ACES config, and using Redshift for my viewer. With the Redshift viewer, you're able to apply different LUTs pretty easily, so I haven't played around too much with configuring Houdini for a specific LUT. I did stumble upon the link below, and sounds like you can apply LUTs directly in Houdini. You'll have to grab a lin2log.lut or whichever you want to use, then apply it under Edit->Color Settings->Color Correction. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/composite/luts.htm

For transferring the @Cd info into the shader, use one of Redshift's RSUserDataColor nodes, and give it Cd as the attribute name. Then plug that into the color input (diffuse_color, emission_color, etc) of the material.

The short version is: from inside Houdini, choose File->Run Script... and point to the generated .cmd files. Here's a longer version, if anyone needs help with the steps involved. There's an option to open a windows shell from inside of Houdini that will have systems variables set to be able to run Houdini's included command-line tools, like the mcbiovision converter. Another good one is abcinfo for sanity-checking any alembic caches you might be working with, either way, there are a lot of useful tools that ship with Houdini that run from the command-line. From Houdini's top menu, choose Windows->Shell This will pop-up a Windows cmd shell. To test that it's working, type in mcbiovision, and you should see the help information displayed in the window. Run the mcbiovision tools to create the .cmd files, and then from houdini, File->Run Script... and point to the resulting .cmd file, then carry on with Atom's #4 item above. Hope this helps, and thanks for sharing Atom, I was looking into converting some mocap animations a few months ago before being sidetracked by Vellum. Dave

I would be great if Houdini had a nice interface for ACES similar to Maya, but you can still setup your own config.ocio file to control studio-specific file handing. See the roles section in the config file. Here is and article from 3D Artist that gives an intro into setting up Houdini for ACES. Also briefly discusses converting your existing textures into ACES via COPs. Nice to have in-line solutions in Houdini for ocio transforms, instead of needing to pre-convert textures, but I have yet to implement this myself in my personal setup. In an Attribute VOP node, the ocio_transform node can be used with the predefined roles from the config.ocio file, or manually set for other non-defined colorspace transforms. https://www.pressreader.com/uk/3d-artist/20181023/281732680454331 Hope this helps, Dave