phong Posted July 30, 2011 Share Posted July 30, 2011 Hi! I want to write an implicit field plugin for PRMan which should load a Houdini cached fluid box and make the voxel data available to the renderer. I couldn't find much about .sim/.bgeo file formats in the HDK, although I don't think these are the right cache files for this purpose since they don't purely represent a fluid cache, but also other simdata/geo. Maybe someone can help me with this? Thanks, Phong Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted July 30, 2011 Share Posted July 30, 2011 Write out a .geo file of your volume primitives. The .geo/.bgeo file format is documented in $HFS/houdini/public/GPD/GPD.txt Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
symek Posted July 31, 2011 Share Posted July 31, 2011 Write out a .geo file of your volume primitives. The .geo/.bgeo file format is documented in $HFS/houdini/public/GPD/GPD.txt Does this document describe volume primitive? I thought it's not (can't check it now). So either one has to make prman plugin dependent on HDK, or use other format (like field3d), hasn't he? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brianburke Posted July 31, 2011 Share Posted July 31, 2011 not sure if you know this already but you don't necessarily have to write a plugin or use any custom formats to do this. the utility 'hbrickmap' makes a brickmap volume prim out of a .bgeo volume. it makes rendering houdini volumes in prman an out-of-the-box capability (and it works quite well). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted August 1, 2011 Share Posted August 1, 2011 Does this document describe volume primitive? I thought it's not (can't check it now). Yes, it does. I know of at least one studio who has successfully implemented it into their in-house version of GPD. But I didn't know about hbrickmap so that's probably the best solution by far. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phong Posted August 10, 2011 Author Share Posted August 10, 2011 Ok, thank you very much for your replies! I indeed tried the hbrickmap tool first and preferred to avoid it for the purpose of transferring houdini volume data to prman because of the following reasons: 1. Just because of its nature, it is a lossy process (.geo -> point-cloud -> brickmap) for which especially a lot of data get lost at the brickmap generation process 2. I cannot feed the brickmap with custom data that I'd like to add, or I haven't figured out how 3. difficult to control how much detail remains in the brickmap (-maxerror doesn't seem to make a big difference) And for some reason my volume box doesn't look right when converted to brickmap. Very blocky and very low resolution. Has anyone achieved good results with hbrickmap and volumes?? Thanks, Phong Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phong Posted August 10, 2011 Author Share Posted August 10, 2011 And how can I create a brickmap with world-space rastering? All my brickmaps get offset. I looked through the docs concerning volume primitives and couldn't find anything about it. Looking at an ascii .geo file, I see a lot of float values for the volume primitive which I'd like to decipher. So if anyone knows more about this, he's more than welcome to post anything Cheers, Nhat Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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