how to access *.pfm file in Houdini

[zasid]

Hello guys,

I used HDRI shop's plugin called lightgen that generates a liting file for houdini rite from an HDRI image .pretty much like that Light bitch script for Lightwave users.

problem is its outputing a *.pfm file which is quite large say like 65 mb how do I call it in Houdini.

Will be thankful for the help.

[symek]

Hello guys,

I used HDRI shop's plugin called lightgen that generates a liting file for houdini rite from an HDRI image .pretty much like that Light bitch script for Lightwave users.

problem is its outputing a *.pfm file which is quite large say like 65 mb how do I call it in Houdini.

Will be thankful for the help.

1. This file isn't meant to be accessible with Houdini. The plugin generates *.cmd file as I remember that you can source in Houdini Textport. The files you're asking about are internal HDRIShop cache used for some other purpose.

2. The size of these files indicates that you're dealing with big HDRI maps, what is pretty useless, since maps in size of 512x256 is fairly enough for lights generation.

3. I suspect that the usefulness of that tool is limited. It was created quite a long time ago. Houdini Area Light with Environmental Map does the same job easier, better, possibly faster, since light rig from that plugin requires lots of lights to get decent results.

4. Finally the script generated by the plugin apparently doesn't support Houdini 9. There were some post on SESI forum complaining about it. Lights objects have changed quite a lot since Houdini 8 or 7. So if you really want to use it with H9, you will be forced to edit *.cmd file after you get it from HDRIShop.

hth,

sy.

Edited April 12, 2008 by SYmek

[zasid]

Thanks Symek for your valuable information.So I should also reduce the size of my image files.they are 3000 X something at the moment which seems to be pretty big now according to your given sizes of the image.