Renderman and Houdini Shadows

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Greetings Everyone,

I am currently teaching myself to use Renderman with Houdini. I haven't had any problems using most of the default renderman shaders and have worked out how to import in my custom Renderman shaders as .otl files. However, I have run into two snags. Firstly, I found no function for converting tiffs (or any other file format) into .tx textures like there is in SLIM. Is there a function for that somewhere in Houdini, or will I need to write a script to take care of that separately?

Second problem: I have been working with the basic renderman shaders and have gotten them to render with the renderman preview without any problems. The problem that I have run into is with trying to create Renderman lights. I first tried creting Renderman light shops and then using them in the SHOP light section. This yeilded lights that realy did not light. With my point lights I was able to create an effective light by setting the up a rib shader under the rib tab as an atenlight. Point light rib shader was just as ugly as the renderman point light sop. I can live with the set up on the point lights though. My problem is with my key light, which is a spot light. I was able to sort of get it going, however, I have not been able to get it to cast shadows. The only shadow shaders that i can find are the default VEX shadows. They doint seem to work with any of the renderman spotlight shaders (including shadowspot) wether loaded from SHOP or from the rib tab. However, when I switch back to no light or rib shaders, the VEX Ratshadow does what it's supposed too. Any suggestions on how to get the Renderman shadered light to cast shadows would be appreciated. Thanks.

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