amination Posted December 11, 2013 Share Posted December 11, 2013 (edited) Hello! Trying to figure out Mantra rendering engine as I watched Peter Quint latest tutorial on H12 Passes, but something that I came across is the envi light is incapable of rendering inside object. How can I come around this and get my ambient occlusion to render out inside of a box? AO.hip Edited December 11, 2013 by amination Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
anim Posted December 11, 2013 Share Posted December 11, 2013 you will need to exclude box from shadowcasting so put * ^box to AO_light's shadow mask 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted December 11, 2013 Share Posted December 11, 2013 also try setting the Max Ray Distance to something small, like 4, on the Environment Light/Light/Render Options. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amination Posted December 11, 2013 Author Share Posted December 11, 2013 Thank you, sir! Also I know in Renderman you can simply bake your ao in point cloud for less memory usage and faster rendering. Can I get this done in Mantra? Though, I found this relative forum for getting baked occ point cloud and color bleeding but I'm wondering now if with Houdini's newer versions this can be done quicker. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted December 12, 2013 Share Posted December 12, 2013 Haven't yet tried to optimise ao with point clouds. Mainly using Envlight Samping Quality and Mantra Pixel Samples, Min/Max Ray Sample and Noise Levels to achieve optimisations. If you find something better it'd be worth posting here. thanks! Not sure how related this is but in H13, SSS rendering ray tracing is apparently as good as the the point cloud method. http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini13.0/news/13/rendering. "Improved ray tracing for physical subsurface scattering (SSS). Since the quality now matches the point cloud method, and raytracing is easier to use, it is now the default on the Physical SSS VOP and Surface Model VOP." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amination Posted December 13, 2013 Author Share Posted December 13, 2013 I found this forum for quick AO rendering, but it still wouldn't help my needs. And thanks for the tip on SSS! The scene I'm working on right now is a bit heavy, so it takes a while to render out occ pass, which is why I need a way to bring down the render time. Right now it takes 11mins per frame Recently, I noticed my shader displacement on some objects disappeared due to "Disable Geometry Material Rendering" on my Mantra. Is there anyway I can bring my shader displacement to occlusion pass and ignore the diffuse color/textures? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted December 13, 2013 Share Posted December 13, 2013 Yep, see attached. The Ao, color and texture is calculated separately from you lighting. Jump inside the Shop/mantrasurface to check out the mods. For your render times, what are you Mantra settings? OccDiffuse_Outputs 5.hip Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amination Posted December 13, 2013 Author Share Posted December 13, 2013 Brilliant! Looks like this oa shader will get me somewhere. Thanks a lot! By the way, I totally forgot about the old school OCC pass, which might come in handy in future My Mantra setting was pretty much as same as yours (pixel sample[2,2], Jitter [0.8], Min Ray[1], Max Ray[4], Noise Level [0.01], and Trans Sample[2]), and on Envi Light setting (sample quality[24], Max Ray[4]). And render time was 11mins/frame. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest tar Posted December 14, 2013 Share Posted December 14, 2013 can you screen capture a Performance Monitor when you hit render? If everything is optimised then it's probably time to dive into Point Clouds to see if they can be quicker. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amination Posted April 7, 2014 Author Share Posted April 7, 2014 Sorry for late reply. I actually smoked my video card as well as motherboard while rendering the scene that time, took me awhile to put things back together. I'll see if I can find a loophole to get AO point cloud base Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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