Rmands 3delight?

[photex]

Hi all,

I'm interested in how others happen to be using 3delight with Houdini. rmands apparently supports everything *except* 3delight, but is this just a matter of creating a slim file equivalent for houdini to use? If that's the case perhaps it's easier to write my own script rather than worry about futzing with rmands for the time being. Are there easily accesible examples of ds files or is this a compiled *thingy*?

thanks,

chip

[jhiggins]

you could manually create the dialog script yourself, but if you have a lot of shaders or big ones, then i guess thats a pain.

otherwise, you're probably better off writing the parser yourself.

alternatively you could parse you're 3delight shader to make it look like some other supported renderer and use the dialog script that rmands generate, but thats a bit awkward.

one thing you can also look at, going forward with new shaders, which you might like is that hrmanshader, which is the command that houdini uses to compile shaders in the VOPs is public domain ( under $H/houdini/public/hrmanshader or something like that).

you can modify it so that it will uses whatever you need to compile 3delight shaders and then you can author shaders in VOPs where doing so automatically builds the dialog script for you, but you would have to prefer VOPs to something like slim or a text editor if you're picky on how you write shaders.

i'm not sure if the whole soho stuff in h9 will make it easier for you as well, but you could give that a shot too if h9 is an option.

good luck,

jeff

PS i'm sure i gave you a lot of options, none of which is "the option", but at least its some food for thought!

[jhiggins]

have you seen this on the wiki

http://odforce.net/wiki/index.php/3DelightSetup

this has more to do with setting up how to render with 3delight from houdini!

i believe your question was more to do with getting shader ui's right?

if just concerned with applying a 3delight shader to geometry and rendering, then you could also just pass in the the shader string instead of applying SHOPs

There are attributes for this if you have prim groups, or alterantively you can look at "RIB Surface" and "RIB Displace" parms on the geo object.

not very artist friendly, but it works.

more to think about i'm sure!

jeff

[photex]

Thanks for the ideas, I think at the moment it doesn't so much matter where the shader is made. More like bringing in an existing set of shaders and giving them a ui so-to-speak in houdini.

The *.ds files look really simple and a small python script to take the output of shaderinfo could easily make them all in one go. But I don't think that would also apply to a nice SHOPs dialog, just the dialog that can build a shader string for you under the RIB settings at the obj level.

Lots to explore now, thanks again.

chip