Howitzer99
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How difficult is it to learn Renderman?
Howitzer99 replied to Kvothe's topic in Lighting & Rendering
RenderMan used to need a lot more tweaking, especially when they were first introducing raytracing into the engine. These days, I'm mostly using Arnold and Redshift, so I'm about 2 versions behind for any advanced with RenderMan. All the renderers have free or trail licenses, so best to just jump in, and test with your scenes and see which one you feel most comfortable with. -
The gamut of ACES is super-wide, which will definitely help to retain the subtleties of colors and shadows in volume renders. I first started using ACES on projects at ILM several years ago, and have never looked back.
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How difficult is it to learn Renderman?
Howitzer99 replied to Kvothe's topic in Lighting & Rendering
I've used RenderMan for many years professionally, but for my own projects, I rely on Redshift for speed, and Arnold for higher quality (especially volumes). There are troves of information regarding any modern renderer online, so learning is much less of an issue these days. As Fred mentioned above, Redshift is pretty easy to use out of the box, and the implementation inside of Houdini is solid. You really can't go wrong with any of the renderers mentioned in these posts. And most offer free or trial licenses. -
Saul Espinosa did some tutorials a couple years ago discussing Cryptomattes and Redshift, and the options for generating Cryptomattes. I believe these were in Maya, but the controls for Redshift are basically the same between the packages.
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Insydium has been releasing a bunch of free X-Particles tutorials on youtube during the covid lockdown.
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I started with a fresh scene, applied the velocity trails, and enabled motion blur on the geo node and the render settings. It's working as expected in both Arnold and Redshift. Maybe try a new houdini scene?
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Have you enabled motion blur on the Geometry node? Under Geometry->Arnold->Motion Blur tab, there is a Velocity Blur parameter. It should be enabled by default, with v as the expected motion blur value to be used for calculations. If that fails, check the docs, something might have been missed: https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFHUG/Motion+Blur
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Official release of the Houdini Music Toolset (HMT)
Howitzer99 replied to andrewlowell's topic in Lounge/General chat
Dude. Sweet! Thanks Andrew. -
Hi Alexey, Will Modeler 2020 be a a free upgrade for those that purchased Modeler 1.0 from you last month? Wasn't expecting a newer product, when the previous version was a 1.0 release. That's a very expensive one-off purchase... Will there be supporting videos for these new H18 versions of Modeler? Has the zone and quick launch menus been re-implemented? It's listed on pages 20-21 of the Modeler 1.0 manual, but there is no menu icon or routine to setup the hotkey for, as per the instructions. Is there a direct way to contact you regarding updates and issues with the product? Cheers. P.S. Re-posting from above, in case you didn't see this.
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Cool, glad it helped.
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A couple things off the top that might help are: Disable the Progressive Render override. You would want to use the bucket method for final renders, progressive is meant for interactive rendering, and is not as accurate (doesn't support all render options). You are throwing a lot of rays into the scene, so yea, I would expect it to take a long time. Can you optimize this or split layers? For reducing noise, lowering the Adaptive Error Threshold below 0.1 will result in cleaner renders, but will be longer to render.
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Cool, glad I could help.
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From your top screenshot, it looks like you just want to render the VDB volumes, correct? If so, then you don't need to enable the Environment option in the Redshift settings, this is a global volume, and isn't required to render VDB volumes. Just ensure you have a volume shader applied to the VDB, and that Volume Scale is set to 1 for any lights that you want to affect the volume. From there, adjust the density scatter and absorption scales of the shader to dial-in the look of the volumes. And if you want, under the Advanced section, you can set the shadow density higher which sometimes helps with shaping the volumes.
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Hi Andrew, The problem was that you were using a Color Layer node instead of a Material Blend node. Just change this and it'll work fine. The Color Layer is for mixing colors and will only output color, and not the material attributes that you were expecting. Also, I usually use the UserData nodes to read point attributes, not the ParticleAttributeLookup you had. In Houini particles are points, but not sure if this workflow would work in Maya, so probably cleaner to use the UserData nodes in any case. Hope this helps.
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For splitting materials across an object in Houdini, the best way I've found is to create groups (Group Create node), and assign the primitives (polys) to each group. Then in a Material node, assign a material to each of your groups. In the image below, I just add a Color node to make it easier to see all of the material groups I created. This can also be used as a base for materialIDs in Substance, just make sure you're applying the colors in vertex not point mode.
