Passing data from COP to SHOP

[keltuzar]

Ok I have setup a network as follows

1) obj

1.1) geoNew

1.1.a ) copnet -> imagetexture

1.1.b ) shopnet

If this is hard then I guess explaining it too will help. I have greated a geometry sop called geoNew, and in that I have two managers, copnet and shopnet.

In the copnet, netowork, after completing the necessary cop nodes I made a final o/p node and named it "imagetexture".

Ok back to the problem.

In the sop I made a point sop and in the $TY I added the following expression:-

pic ("/obj/geoNew/copnet/imagetexture", $BBX, $BBZ,  v)

this works fine and the point displaces the geometry appropriately

Now in the shop I added the same line as follows:-

pic ("/obj/geoNew/copnet/imagetexture", 0.5, 0.5, D_CVAL)

But alas it doesnt seem to work.

Please note I tried to following to try to solve it but doesnt work

1) trying to make the function call from pic to tex.(PS what difference is there between pic, and picni or tex and texni, or pic and tex!)

2) using the backtick (`) in the opening and closing of the expression thinking if I am adding in a string feild it would not evaluate without it...

ex:-

 `pic ("/obj/geoNew/copnet/imagetexture", 0.5, 0.5, D_CVAL)`

3) even going to the extent of chaning the last value to check for red D_CR

so what am I doing wrong here?

Thanks in advance

[aracid]

hey keltuzar

under ur shop texture map

use this

op:/obj/geoNew/copnet/imagetexture

hope that helps

all the best

aracid

[old school]

Yes, the op: reference in the image string field will cause the compositor to do it's thing then Houdini will embed the image in to the generated .ifd. This means that the image is not referenced from disk but directlty from the .ifd when mantra goes to render the file.

This can be very handy or very bad.

Handy in the sence that farming out shots between an adhoc network of machines gives you a level of independence from the actual image location as the images are stored in the .ifd.

Bad in the sence that your .ifd can bloat to a huge size with many texture maps per frame that are essentially the same image repeated over and over.

The only exception that would prompt me to embed textures in the .ifd is if I were truly changing the texture map per frame in the COP network and the image was fairly small. Even then I would be apt to cache the images to disk.

[keltuzar]

Ok this there is another problem I am having and this is something to do with passing procedural textures from one shop to another...

I tried using the op command but it doesnt work.

My intension is to use the shader color of one shop and pass that information to the texture location of the displacement map shader...

So anyone has a solution on how to pass such information?

Thanks in anvance

[sibarrick]

You can use dimport to import an exported variable from a displacement shader to a surface shader. But not the other way round. This is because displacements get calculated first.