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Hello everyone! I have scene with emissive volume and no density rendered in Karma which is being comped over footage. Issue: since its emissive transparent pixels I was unable to replicate the exact look in AE. Currently ignoring the transparency and using screen blend mode. I have read about straight and premul alpha, but couldnt implement these findings. I know its impossible to have volumes emit light, while not blocking any light, but it would save a ton of time to render without density. Anyone stumbled upon this and found elegant simple solution? Essentially I want to have at least some sort of see through edges and full opaque volume inside dense areas. Thank you very much for any help, I might want something impossible, but that's where creativity comes :D

Hello people! I'm currently trying to render pyro exoplosion with the motion blur in Redshift and I didn't succeed with any of my aproaches. I tried Convert to VDB , and then Merge Volume in Velocity mode with the motion blur ON but nothing works yet. I found few HIP examples but they neather don't work. Is there anybody who ever did this? Too bad there's nothing about it in the Redshift official documentation too. Please help

Hello, everyone! I'm very excited to share my Procedural Lake Houses tutorial series, where I show how to generate the houses all the way from base silhouette to final shading. Example of the Generated Content: Link to cmiVFX page: https://cmivfx.com/products/494-procedural-lake-house-building-creation-in-houdini-volume-1 Thank you for watching and have a good day!

Hello guys. As title says, I'm created an grayscale procedural texture in Cops network. I'm made it work as displace map, however it comes as huge cost, needing an ultra high detailed grid. I'm would like to use it as bump, since the ideia it's to use that as fine details. I'm couldnt make it work by writing the path of copy into texture path in Bump & Normals tab. Not clue what's suppoed to do. Please help me. bump_v00.hipnc

Hi, We are working on setting up and rendering camera motion to an environment we created on Unreal Engine 5. Our scene is foliage-heavy, and there is foliage in/as the background. So, from camera view, the foliage isn't visible - only when we go close to it, it becomes visible. To fix that, we also put 'foliage.MaxTrianglestoRender 50000000000000' and 'foliage.ForceLOD 0' and it isn't rendering a single frame - GPU crashes right when put to render. Our GPU is Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 on one system and Nvidia GeForce RTX 3090. Please tell us what is the best way forward to render a foliage-heavy sequencer. Ps. We tried breaking our sequencer into parts and that crashed too.

Hey, I have a problem with aces in 19.5. I've got blue artifacts. The same config in 19.0 works correct. After a week of conversations with support I understand that they are not use external configs and there is no help. If you have h19.5 with external aces profile can you render my scene and check if you get blue artifacts on render? Thanks! bug.zip

Helo houdini nation. Just a simple question. I am rendering animation in mantra, and I just want to know if u guys don't know if there is a possibility to set a render time limit per frame. Like Corona renderer has for example, so I can guess the approximate time rendering of whole animation (all frames)? Thank you very much for any suggestions. corona example: time-limit per fame:

Hello Magicians! I was wondering, is it possible to save the deep EXR from render view? Let's say your render works properly locally, but on farm it crashes all the time. Nobody knows why. So, you render the frames locally and save it in to the sequence folder. Problem is, deep is needed as well. How do you do it? Maybe it is super obvious, but I can not find it right now. Thanks for any answers already, wish you low render times. Cheers.

Hi all, I have a Karma hair question. I'm using Hair Shader and a hdri light plus area light. What parameters may I have to tweak to get rid of noise? Now I have those parameters: Pixel Samples 192 Min Ray Samples 1 Max Ray Samples 9 Light Sampling Quality 4 The rest as default I tried Pixel Samples 256 and Max Ray Samples 32 but rendertime escalates drastically, also rendered at higher resolution with lower samples. Is there any parameter I'm missing or any more optimized way? Thanks in advance

Hey all, I'm trying to render out a crowd in mantra, and while my hair and hat styles are working, I'd like to add some variation to the crowd agent itself. I've already baked out maps for each agent via COPs ( 8 each) and the idea is to create a style for each agent, in this case M_01_*. I'm Trying to randomize the highlighted number in the img attached and fit it 00-07 based on @primnum or @ptnum if possible? Or can you directly use an attribute value in Material style sheets? I could just create an integer value per agent via vex then somehow use it in the style sheet? Thanks in advance!

Hey Everyone, I'm setting up a pretty basic vellum cloth simulation > a pop wind and a pop force as gravity only operating on one group and that group grows over time. now, when I let it run the solver seems to delete primitives as some kind of tearing effect (ripping apart the cloth under stress) I don't know. some primitives turn black and then they disappear. It's a kind of tearing effect that I want to avoid or disable, I just seem to not find the setting. I do have welds in the setup but breaking is disabled. I really don't want no tearing at all. It would be great if someone can push me in the right direction. Cheers captue_0002.mp4

Hey everyone with the newest Houdini I seem having an issue with the environment light, rendering with mantra. When I insert an HDR or EXR it will be shown in the viewport correctly, but when I hit the render button I get the message prompted seen in the image attached. Help would highly be appreciated!

Hey there, after years I finally decide to study Houdini more seriously. I'm starting again with the Particles course from Applied Houdini, I just finish my first run with the 2nd vol. and I'm really interested in GPU rendering because of rendering time. It's not that I don't like Mantra (actually sounds super interesting to have a native renderer so robust), but for example the last scene I worked, with like 50M particles, took me more than 10 hours to render like 4 seconds at 1280x720. So I would like to take some advices from you: since I'm just a beginner, is it interesting to already try to work with a GPU renderer, like Redshift, so my rendering time will be faster and I'll be able to explore and study more things quickly as well? Or should be better to keep with Mantra and get more knowledge about it? Thank you!

Hey everyone, basically what I have is this: and what I want is this: Obviously, it looks like I could just move the pig head up in space haha. But I have a more specific case that requires the pig head to be visible through the plane giving the ILLUSION that it's on top of it. Put simply, I want the pig head to always be drawn/rendered on top of the plane, regardless of depth/occlusion. It's really easy to achieve this with compositing, but I'm hoping to pull this off at render time using materials in Mantra. I'm open to some complicated node setups (maybe turning the plane transparent wherever the pig head is behind it???) But hopefully it's just an easy setting that I've missed. Thanks so much in advance!

Hi, I have an issue with Karma and instances. I use Karma as a render node in the SOP context in a ROP node (so not in Solaris). The instances I set are showing in the viewport, working properly in Mantra, but not in Karma. Here is a simple example: This is what I get in Mantra: But unfortunately Karma shows no instances: Is there a special way instances can be rendered out with Karma? I hope someone can explain wht I missed. Thank you in advance. PS: sample file is attached. karma_instance_issue.hipnc

Hi, I am trying to render a volume which has been rasterized from a bunch of points and that volume is in constant motion. The camera pans fast from left to right tracking the moving volume. I have a test camera that's static and if I take a test render through that static camera, the motion blur looks proper. But when I render though my shot's animated camera, the motion blur is messed up. The volume looks like a blurry blob of mess with no definite shape to it. I tried asking people that I know personally. Everyone suggested to reduce shutter time in camera or completely make it 0. But that's completely removing motion blur. Is there a way to make mantra pick only the velocity blur and not camera blur?

Hey there. little emergency here going on: can some one tell me how to render in arnold without a background. don´t have a HDRI/background object but it´s still black. tried everything i could think of and tried using a aov with a alpha map but with no success. thank you!

Hey hey, a little question. Why I was get this render (1)? How can I get render like this (2), but with transparent background? Thanks

Hi everyone, I'm newbie to Houdini and Redshift... I need your help! I failed to render Cryptomatte with correct object ID, and want to re-render only Cryptomatte without rendering main images to save time. Is it possible or is there any way to skip rendering main images? I just don't want to waste time to render the same images again..... I appreciate your help! JK

Hi there! I would like to do a render passes where every object has a constant colour and right now I am doing it via takes ( which is very time consuming to set up). I have also tried the op_id and primid in mantra but that doesn't give me a different colour for each object in the scene. How would I go about doing this more efficiently? Any and all help would be greatly appreciated Cheers! Ronald

Hi I've been playing around with the wdas data set cloud and I've noticed that we houdini users (who are not lucky enough to have access to shaders dveloped by giant companies) lack an overall dense (almost pyroclastic) cloud shader that shows the distinct features of puffy cumulus clouds. After a through searching both in web and odforce i've seen that a few people also inquired on the same subject but it was inconclusive. I've decided to use this post as an idea dump to possibly implement a new shader or track your opinion on the subject. During the searching i've realized that distinct features of dense clouds are achievable by either using a very high number of internal light bounces or by faking them. I have seen that dark edges are the most prominent feature of the dense clouds since the other effects as transmittance and high forward scattering are already studied and implemented in shaders. To assess the current state of volume rendering other then mantra i've done a couple tests with several renderers in maya and also tried the new terragen 4.2. The most beautiful (simulating a real cloud light) is the hyperion render. Terragen 4 clouds are also very realistic and detailed (http://terragen4.com/first-look/). Arnold seems to be the best commercial option out there and is very good in giving the edge darkening but fails at details in dark areas (which is highly visible in hyperion) but i think these areas can be compansated with additional ligths. Redshift render is blazing fast but no where near the realism. In houdini i have used pbr with 50 volume limit, 5x5 samples, volume quality at 2 with a standart volume cloud shader. I have just started to see dark edges but even rendering a very small portion of 1920x1080 image took me about 10 minutes ( 2xE5-2680 v3, 48 cores total) . For speed comparison, redshift was the fastest with a couple minutes, arnold took about 10 minutes, terragen is said to be around an hour for a very heavy cumulus cloud. No information about hyperion but since wdas has a 50.000 core farm it shouldn't be a problem. Mantra was the worst with a projected couple hours of total render. Below are the sources i found for future reference for myself Oliver also asked about a cloud shader and Mike Lyndon says he has implemented a shader before (https://forums.odforce.net/topic/17900-cloud-shader/) . This is the most prominent one and is the one i will be implementing. The thesis of Antoine Bouthors that Mike says he has implemented (http://evasion.imag.fr/~Antoine.Bouthors/research/phd/thesis/thesis.pdf) . Beautiful mie scattering solution by Matt and the base for my shader (http://mattebb.com/weblog/rendering-clouds-with-the-mie-phase-function/) Odforce user Andrea was also interested in such topic and has some ideas in it (https://forums.odforce.net/topic/24831-cloud-shader/) Modelling aspect of clouds (https://forums.odforce.net/topic/12923-pyroclastic-noise-demystified/?page=2) Siggraph presentation by Magnus Wrenninge (http://magnuswrenninge.com/content/pubs/VolumetricMethodsInVisualEffects2010.pdf) Realtime clouds for horizon zero dawn by guerilla games. realtime but has really nice implementations (horizon zero dawn real time clouds) A hefty paper from Hyperion developer Yining Karl Li (https://blog.yiningkarlli.com/2017/07/spectral-and-decomposition-tracking.html) With the directions i gathered from Mike Lyndon's post i have started implementing the photon map approach. I have already implemented a henyey-greenstein phase function and added the contribution by radiance photons. Now i will try to implement the ideas presented in the thesis of Antoine, with high focus on cumulus cloud rendering (ch. 7). Attached is the current state of shader (cloud_shader.rar) I am also interested in GLSL implementations for viewport and cloud modelling tools but i guess this post wil be mostly about a shop type implementation. anyway here is a simple glsl implementation work and i am open to every feedback https://forums.odforce.net/topic/32197-glsl-pipeline-in-houdini/?tab=comments#comment-190945 I am definitely not an expert on this subject, so all input, ideas, criticsm, and source is welcomed. Thank you. Hyperion Render (wdas_cloud_hyperion_render.png is Copyright 2017 Disney Enterprises, Inc. and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License ) Terragen 4 Render terragen_4_render.tif Houdini Pbr Render (the little part on top took 10 minutes to render so i left it unfinished) Arnold Render Redshift Render

Hello everybody, I have a problem with the boolean tool. I have a cube and a font. I want the font to be inside the cube, but in the form of a hole. First I tried to subtract the font from the cube with the boolean node, but that didn't work, so tried to fracture the cube with the voronoi node first and then added a boolean node, but that didn't work either. Does anyone know a solution for this or can help me? Thanks in advance! This is what I want to achieve: This is my attempt with the voronoi fracture: This is my node tree: These are my parameters:

Hello wizards! I am doing some glass renderings, and for a very specific case I am facing a problem that could be potentially solved by limiting how far a refraction ray should travel. Like, if the next level of ray depth already travelled a certain distance kill it and return the color of the environment for example. This is because there are some cases where my object could refract itself which is something desirable but only at a certain distance. I found on the documentation that there is a maxdist for the RayOption on the trace() and refractlight() function, but I have no idea how would I go into using it or building the shader. The render configuration right now is using a custom lens that at the beginning of the project meant for it to let us see the other side of this water cylinder, I can hide a portion of it by limiting the far clipping, but then of course parts that are inside the refraction will still be visible, that's why I'd like to be able to kill the refraction rays if the have travelled a certain distance since self refractions are still desirable for the surface's top part. So far what I would be trying is a combination of manual masking and using the RayLevel image plane that gives me a little of what I need but still not the perfect solution. Certainly a bit of help regarding manipulating the rays within Mantra would be of huge help.

Hi, I can't find a way to get what I can get with a colored specular map in Substance Designer. I'm basically trying to get a fake iridescent effect by coloring my specular map, but in the principled shader, the specular is a float type, so no way to put some colors in there.. In the past I was on Maya with Renderman and there was a specular and an edge color parameter, in wich I was able to put some color, but no parameter is a color in the principled color. I'll put some screenshot of the desired look I want. It's done in Substance designer, with a black diffuse, a normal, a white specular and the colored map in the specular edge color. It'll be used in a movie project for my school so I really hope to get some help , please help !

Hey everyone, Whenever I go to the render viewport in Houdini 17.0.352 I get the following message "Error : failed to save output to file "traceback (most recent call last):" I joined here both the error message I get when I start Houdini and the Message I get when trying to render using mantra. BUG report.pdf Trying to render a frame manually (save to jpeg) also leads to an error. I tried reinstalling Houdini or even deleting preferences but none of this worked. I believe this is a bug linked to Python, but can't figure out what exactly. -- Could you guys please help me with this situation ?