Mantra not reading displacement maps for Ocean Waves tool

[jrockstad]

Hi guys, so, I was quite excited to check out the new Ocean Waves shelf tool in Houdini, as it looks like a great way to get a good-looking ocean together without the render expense and complexity of a full-blown fluid sim, however, I've run into a bit of a snag. Following this tutorial from Side Effects, I've been able to render out the displacement maps just fine, which I can confirm by opening them in MPlay and seeing that the displacement / cusp / foam channels are all where they ought to be, but when I render in Mantra I only get a flat ocean surface with no displacement. I have also gone into the materials and confirmed that they are referencing the correct path for the displacement maps. I've tested this on the most recent production builds of Houdini for both OS X and Windows, and the behavior is the same.

 

I'd love to get this up and running as it seems like a very handy tool, so I would be grateful for any assistance you can offer. Thanks!

[Guest tar]

are you using an apprentice version of Houdini? That is a common issue there but has worked fine in the commercial version

[edward]

Search for this on the sidefx.com forums. The solution is to change where the ocean texture is specified and to change it from a .pic to .picnc extension because that's what Apprentice outputs for images.

[jrockstad]

Thanks to both of you. Yes indeed I am using the Apprentice version of Houdini - I had a little niggling feeling that might have been the issue, so thanks for confirming it and pointing me in the right direction.