how to capture what is cooking while saving file?

[catchyid]

hi,

Let's say you have a pyro sim, and you use file cache to save result. If an artist presses on "Save to Disk", he will get updates on what is cooking now (this way, he knows if one step is too heavy or at least which frame is being processed now)  -- See blow: "it's solving GAS_Advect and on frame 42"

Question: we do sims on the farm in batch mode (i.e. houdini engine) using a python script that emulates press button, e.g. node.parm('execute').pressButton(), and my goal is to capture the status bar or window status text (to store it as log), however, and I am not sure how to do that, any ideas?

 

Thx

[catchyid]

just an update if someone is interested : no feature so far to do so in HOM, RFE 36966 has been logged by SideFX to support this function

 

thx

[Atom]

On 6/2/2021 at 5:04 PM, catchyid said:

any ideas?

Maybe try turning on the Alfred Style Progress. I think that may kick out a frame by frame log to the console. Not sure how to intercept the console on-the-fly, however...

 

-> Try placing python code inside the Pre-Render or Post-Render script field of the filecache or ROP. You could access the hou.playbar to grab the current frame. Remember to switch the field type from hScript to Python. 

 

What if you updated your farm to use a tops based solution?

Set the filecache to a Save Current Frame, then loop over the frame range in tops setting a new frame based geometry filename every iteration? This could allow you to drop in a pythonscript node that can run some code every frame.

 

Edited June 4, 2021 by Atom

[catchyid]

Thaanks Atom, super late I know... We have our own Farm so using TOPS would not be possible...I tried ALFRED and it spits out frame number but no details on what is being cooked now (e.g. pressure solve, advect, ...) ... If I use pre-render and post-render it will be able to know only frame number which is the same as ALFERD...anyways, sideFX "should" provide more APIs to do that...once more, thx for your ideas