prototype_material

[mrice]

sorry to be shooting many questions!

Am i correct to assume that AOV passes are not correctly working in PBR mode?

Ask whatever comes up & I'll answer if I can.

If you look at your rop, when you add an output variable there's a drop-down menu next to the VEX_Variable parameter. There's a bunch of hard-coded outputs for PBR there.

To render other outputs from the shader, you can add the "vm_pbrsurfaceexports" parameter to the rop via the gear menu. When that's enabled mantra will run both the bsdf path and color path of your materials (which will be much slower).

There might be a way to create custom pbr variables in the future from a pathtrace shader which could be controlled via python, hadn't thought about that.

[mrice]

You mean diffuse model has to be lambert ?I am using PBR which shadows are on by default and no photo shootng involved.

thx

I mean you have to explicitly turn on shadows on the lights for some reason. Does that work?

[altbighead]

wow.My jaw is dropped and also confused about PBR and shading in general.

My previous knowledge and understanding is that in order to output aov passes,you have to export your desired passes from shader first.

What I did with your material is I added "Generate Surface Shader Exports"(aka "vm_pbrsurfaceexports") from "Edit Rendering Parameters" and

I was able to get some of the passes working with your prototype_material like reflection,specular and diffuse.

What you are saying is regardless of what shader you used,mantra will try to spit out hard coded outputs in PBR mode?

thx again,learning quite a few things today.

[altbighead]

I mean you have to explicitly turn on shadows on the lights for some reason. Does that work?

strange but it works!

[mrice]

My previous knowledge and understanding is that in order to output aov passes,you have to export your desired passes from shader first.

What I did with your material is I added "Generate Surface Shader Exports"(aka "vm_pbrsurfaceexports") from "Edit Rendering Parameters" and

I was able to get some of the passes working with your prototype_material like reflection,specular and diffuse.

What you are saying is regardless of what shader you used,mantra will try to spit out hard coded outputs in PBR mode?

PBR probably still jibes with your previous understanding. With PBR mantra is running a pathtrace shader in "fog" context under the hood, and those outputs you see on the rop are coded in that shader.

For passes like specular, diffuse, etc I think you're better off using the pbr outputs from the rop, that will be faster, and the ones you get from vm_pbrsurfaceexports might not be accurate (not sure about that though).

[mrice]

There are some quirks with the oren-nayer model. Try turning on raytrace shadows on the light.

Another thing you might run into is that shooting photons doesnt work on surfaces shaded with oren-nayer, so you would need to switch the surface to lambert when creating a photon map.

OK I just looked into this, the 'quirks' are because oren-nayer shouldnt be there at all, something I did when I should have been asleep.

So don't use the oren-nayer pbr diffuse model, it will be gone in the next release!

[goldleaf]

I've been trying to get your shader to load. The otl install fine, and I've copied the vex files, dylibs to where they should be, but everytime i put the prototype material into a SHOP network, I get an error saying a required lib simplexnoise.dylib isn't loaded.

Is there a reason why? I've put it into where I thought the readme was saying, and tried some other options, just in case.

[mrice]

The osx binaries were mistakenly from an older build, and it seems that I never updated the link.

Try downloading now and let me know if you have any trouble.

[goldleaf]

Thanks Michael. I tried it with the new ones, and I'm still getting the same error. I thought it might be the OTL, but I tried the one included with the corrected dmg, and it gave the same error (that otl didn't show a newer creation date, so it may not have been updated).

I was poking around in the python code of the otl, and the code appears to be looking at a lot of simplexnoise, but all of the files are named vex_simplexnoise. So I switched those around (not sure if I did the right thing though), and it still errored out.

Edited April 3, 2010 by goldleaf

[mrice]

Which Houdini build are you using? OSX 10.5 or 10.6?

Houdini on macos seems to be more sensitive to which build the plugins were compiled against than on windows or linux.

And if you're using 10.6 you'll have to compile yourself, but others have said it works.

I was poking around in the python code of the otl, and the code appears to be looking at a lot of simplexnoise, but all of the files are named vex_simplexnoise. So I switched those around (not sure if I did the right thing though), and it still errored out.

You don't need to change any names. If you have houdini's environment variables setup you can verify that the vex dso's are being loaded by typing "vcc -X surface" in a terminal, you should see the simplexnoise and cellular functions at the end of the list. If you don't have the environment variables set you can open a shell from houdini, windows->shell, and try from there.

[goldleaf]

I'm using build 523, OS X 10.6, and I can see what you mean about sensitivity. Getting Bullet compiled and working has been touch and go in OS X. If I remember right, I tried to compile it a few weeks ago when first released, but I can't remember why it didn't work.

I'll work on it, and post my progress here. Thanks!

[ben]

Same error with simplexnoise.dylib (build 554, OSX10.6)

Did someone compiled it for 10.6 ? Goldleaf maybe ? If yes I would really appreciate you post it.

Otherwise I guess I'll have to figure out how to do it by myself...

any help welcome

thanks

[goldleaf]

I haven't had time yet. Hopefully, I'll get it working before the end of the week.

[goldleaf]

Hi Ben,

Here is how I was able to compile it without any problems (thanks mrice for the help!):

From within the OS X download, there are two files inside of the folder 'makefiles' (Makefile.gnu, Makefile.mac). Using the terminal, you need to sudo cp those two files into /Library/Frameworks/Houdini.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/toolkit/makefiles/. This will replace the Makefile.gnu that is already there, so if you want to, back it up. I don't believe it causes any problems if you don't back it up.

Now, using a Terminal that has the Houdini variables setup, cd into the folder where the source for the material is and run 'make', then 'make install', and it should set everything up. Please note, that I had already followed Mike's instructions of copying everything into their appropriate places, so you might want to do the same if compiling doesn't work.

I've attached the files that were build when I compiled; they were done with 10.0.523.

snowLeopard_prototype_523.zip

[ben]

Hi Chris,

I didn't try it yet, but I'll look at it tonight.

Thanks a lot for the file and the explanations.

And of course thanks to mrice !

[dbukovec]

Hey!

Big silence here. Michael, are You working to implement into the next version of Houdini?