schwungsau

nope, only renderman23 have gallery option... i thought of it to write a gallery on my own. fairly straight forwards with python panel

it works perfectly fine here with houdini18. you have make sure you using RM23 shelf / nodes. if you see only RIS only the renderman plugin is not corrected loaded.

in Arnold, you can assign a volume shader to a mesh and set the setup size an object property (a arnold parameter) --> Arnold will render it as uniform volume ( if the mesh is closed). but you can not assign a surface shader to volume.

this very confusing question raises 25 more questions. no render in the world will allow you to mix volume and surface shaders.....

testing new Arnold 6.0.3 GPU renderer update on particles Recent HtoA 5.2.1 made it possible to actually use Arnold6 GPU in Houdini, i tool it on a test ride with particles. (5 million particles). the setup is quite simple, pure diffuse shading only AA samples. I've chosen a darker frame to test the sample quality. CPU 2 minutes on 6 core Xeon : GPU 1 minute (Nvidia Quadro RTX5000), same sample count the CPU render above but more little more noise. GPU 1:30 minute, increased the sample to get a noise free render. the Arnold GPU render it getting slowly faster the Arnold CPU in some cases, there is still long road ahead to for the GPU renderer speed to catch up with competition.

external renderers does not support packed bgeo. otherwise, if you render on a renderfarm, it would take 1 additional Houdini licence per machine. (loading a bgeo file format will draw one licence). you need to use fast instance points and on the points, create a sting attr, which points to an alembic or an ass file.

it only works on point instaner nodes (objects level) anyway. everything inside SOP is mostly only supported by sidefx. Arnold, Renderman, redshift does not support it... --> happen is sop level, stays in the sop level

yeah is no industry standard for camera's yet, each company has its own secret sauce and the materials are not solved. USD is currently a data management /layout system for geometry.

SDF is same. you have a single value of the distance, and if its inside or outside the volume. for foggy stuff, you could just calculate the point density with pointcloud lookup on the polygons'points or transfer the density values to the polyons.

nope, there even is not proper renderview in yet. come back for solaris/houdini19

please no break Down's ! nobody wants to know, if you was able to find aov botton for the specluar pass or how change the gamma on the renderpass. good Artist should able to get raw beauty pass out which is pretty close to reference. in worst case it shows you was not able to get the details from the playblast into your rendering.

with arnold operators, you can assign shaders , material X etc... https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFHUG/Operators

nope, its does not work. HtoA is the woerst render plugin. even cops itself has its issues it not full support in Tops either.

fresnel does not work on volumes, you don't have a surface to bounce off (no ray incoming angle etc...) all you have is density values, some voxel has no density, some low density and full density, kinda. the only way i see, if you convert it into polygons do fresnel in VEX and convert into a "fresnel" field for shading.

visiblity is a bitmask. In decimal: AI_RAY_CAMERA = 1 AI_RAY_SHADOW = 2 AI_RAY_DIFFUSE_TRANSMIT = 4 AI_RAY_SPECULAR_TRANSMIT = 8 AI_RAY_VOLUME = 16 AI_RAY_DIFFUSE_REFLECT = 32 AI_RAY_SPECULAR_REFLECT = 64 AI_RAY_SUBSURFACE = 128 So visiblity = 13 gives you camera and transmission (1 + 4 + 8 = 13 )