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Houdini 10, RenderMan and shadows


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Hello people,

So, it seems that I am unable to generate shadows using renderman in Houdini 10. I was hoping that it would have a semblance of setting up a sphere on a grid with a light that is casting raytraced shadows. Apparantly not. I wouldn't suppose someone here could tell me what i am missing in order to get shadows going with RMan? I'd appreciate it. Thank you.

David

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Hi David. Have you generated shadow maps for prman yet? It's been a long time since I've last used prman, so I could be way off by now. basically, you'll need to specify a path in your Light object's shadow map parameter to generate shadow map. Once this is process is done, you'll need to bring this shadow map into your rman shader or else you will not get any shadows in your render. This is for DSM generation of course. I can't recall if you need to do any texture conversion (for example, converting Houdini's .rat file to prman's .tx file), but if you do, you'll need to use the shell terminal to run an iconvert command to convert it. iconvert is SideFX's image conversion tool (going from .pic to .jpg, or .rat to .tx, for example).

Hopefully it still works tho... the last time I've used prman with Houdini were the days before H9 released......

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In the hlight, you can set the shadow map file parameter to "raytrace" and that'll work.

Putting together a proper sort of light shader (there's a lot of renderman literature that'll point you in the right direction on the net) and using the light template object or your own soho light wrangler is probably a better long term solution tho...

Good luck.

Hello people,

So, it seems that I am unable to generate shadows using renderman in Houdini 10. I was hoping that it would have a semblance of setting up a sphere on a grid with a light that is casting raytraced shadows. Apparantly not. I wouldn't suppose someone here could tell me what i am missing in order to get shadows going with RMan? I'd appreciate it. Thank you.

David

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Oh Good Lord! Sometimes I wonder about my mind.

Ahem, the reason I was not getting shadows was because I didn't have any RMan shaders assigned to either the sphere or the grid. The fun thing about going to a new context, i.e. RenderMan, is that the most simple things get overlooked. When I make a sphere in Houdini, Maya, 3DSMax etc. . . . it comes in with a DEFAULT shader that is based around the context of the package in question. Ugggg . . . I need a beer!

David

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