VRAY procedurals in windows

[ivan]

dunno what I'm doint wrong, but I cannot get Mantra to find my VRAY procedurals.

I tried using the DemoBox example, and that failed too. I figured maybe I'd set up the OTL wrong, so, I dug around and found Peter Claes brand spankin' new instancer, complete with a H11 tested OTL and everything, no dice. I get this:

mantra: Cannot allocate procedural 'instancePc' on object /obj/instancer

(insert "I hate windows" rant here)

[Ratman]

Hey Ivan, you got everything in place?

1 - DSO at $HOME/houdini11.0/dso/mantra

2 - Have the VRAYprocedural in $HOME/houdini11.0

Depending on your setup the VRAYprocedural text file might have a check for windows or linux, I often found that for windows I had to just delete out the linux check and just have it be default for windows.

Hope this helps!

-Rick

[pclaes]

Hi Ivan,

glad to hear you are trying it out! Sorry to hear you have difficulties, but I guess that comes with the territory - I had a huge amount of problems when I first tried it out, mostly related to my system not being configured properly -> libraries missing, wrong version of the compiler, dso in the wrong place, otl and parameters inside the otl named slightly different and therefore not linking up properly. So hang in there, the rewards are worth it.

I'll see if I can get it working on windows over the weekend - I've never compiled on windows yet and hopefully the code doesn't break.

I kinda decided to release the source for "early birds", I do intend to do more step by step post to build up towards the entire instancer. But still, it would be good to get it working on windows too. So I'll look into it over the weekend.

The dso that is provided was compiled on linux 64 bit ubuntu 9.04, so you will definitely have to compile from scratch on windows. There is some info on compiling for windows on the odforce wiki and perhaps others that have done it a lot can chip in and maybe write down a check list (this would be for my own benefit too ).

What version of windows are you on? Did you manage to compile the star sop?

[ivan]

after much headache, I got windows compiling, and sops compile and run fine. i compiled your code, and it compiled fine. However, Mantra under windoze cannot seem to find the .dll for some reason...

[pclaes]

Hi Ivan,

I got it working and compiled under windows 7. You can use the express edition for 32bit, but for 64bit I think you need to install the windows software development kit and configure it. Or use the full version of the software, but that is ridiculously expensive in comparison to the free gnu compiler on linux.

I followed the instructions on sidefx hdk docs and odwiki and It was fairly painless and I'm glad the code compiled as is, but I still would not want to use windows as my main development platform.

As Ratman stated I had to modify the VRAYprocedural so it bypasses the linux check, mainly because the $HOUDINI_OS variable doesn't seem to get set:

//#if $HOUDINI_OS == "Windows"
//    #define DSO_FILE(filename)	mantra/filename.dll
//#else
//    #define DSO_FILE(filename)	mantra/filename.so
//#endif
#define DSO_FILE(filename)	mantra/filename.dll

demobox			DSO_FILE(VRAY_DemoBox)
demofile		DSO_FILE(VRAY_DemoFile)
demostamp		DSO_FILE(VRAY_DemoStamp)
demovolume		DSO_FILE(VRAY_DemoVolumeSphere)
demomountain		DSO_FILE(VRAY_DemoMountain)
instancePc		DSO_FILE(VRAY_instancePc)

Also inside the scene file I had to rewrite the pointcloud that is used for the template points as the instance_path was baked into it and needed to be updated.

Good luck!