Annotation Render ? how ?

[kensonuken]

I want to integrate annotation in the render howz that possible?

Edited August 27, 2008 by kensonuken

[aracid]

I want to integrate annotation in the render howz that possible?

Hey hey

where do u want this annotation to be?

embedded onto the picture or as meta data on the file ?

[Richard]

I want to integrate annotation in the render howz that possible?

Hi,

If you want to annotate a render you can press alt+c in mplay this will allow you to add a comment onto the render.

I find this a very useful feature when do shading/lighting as I can leave a few different versions of renders in mplay with the different written on the bottom.

Unfortunately when you save these pics out you lose the writing as it is not embedded over the image. This is a pity as it would be a quite useful to knock out

a few different renders of a a shader on a generic object note the settings in the pic and keeps these on file.

Hope this helps

The other option is save it out write it up in photoshop

and save it again but that just sounds like work!

On a similar topic if someone knows how to print the frame render time out in the corner of an image this would be great.

I have tried using the render scheduler to keep an eye on frame times but it always wipes out the render time after the render completes even when I untick the clear completed jobs box, very annoying. I know you can check the verbose output in the terminal but it be useful to be able to knock through 100 frames go for lunch (not that my computer can do 100 frames in the ten mins I get for lunch) and check through frames based on render time to see where its all going wrong.

[digitallysane]

I have tried using the render scheduler to keep an eye on frame times but it always wipes out the render time after the render completes even when I untick the clear completed jobs box, very annoying.

This was fixed in recent builds of 9.5.

Dragos

[old school]

To render text directly on top of the rendered image, you can take advantage of the command-line tool "hwatermark" shipped with Houdini.

This is an example that works with the Wedge ROP to render the value on top of the image. In the Mantra output diver, in the Post Frame Script, add the following line:

unix hwatermark -x 4 10 -m "$WEDGE" `chs("vm_picture")` `chs("vm_picture")` $HFS/houdini/fonts_texture/Fixed-Bold.24

where `chs("vm_picture")` returns the name of the image rendered to disk. This method works when rendering directly to disk.

You can replace $WEDGE with $F if you want the current frame output or whatever you want.

Best to render your frames padded at the top/bottom and put the text there.

Here's the usage on hwatermark fyi so you can expand on the above:

$ hwatermark -h
Usage: c:\HFS95~1.188\bin\hwatermark.exe [-q] [-a alpha] [-c r g b] [-x x y] [-m msg] src.pic dst.pic fontfile
Where the src.pic is the image to watermark, dst.pic the file to save the result to, and fontfile the full path to the file to use as the font.
- The -a option has a parameter, the alpha to use for compositing.  It should be in the range 0..255
- The -c option has three parameters, the red, green, and blue colours to composite the text in.  This should be specified in the range 0..255
- The -m option specifies the message to composite onto the image.
- If the -q option is present, all text output is suppressed
- The -x option has two parameters, the x & y location of the text in the image.  It should be specified in pixels.

[Jason]

To render text directly on top of the rendered image, you can take advantage of the command-line tool "hwatermark" shipped with Houdini.

Just a quickie, Jeff - the hwatermark example on the WedgeROP help card is seriously wrong.

[old school]

Yep. Bug ID=32268.

[Jason]

Thanks Jeff.

What I was trying yesterday - with limited success - was using the Artist Comment field in the Mantra ROP to stuff the $WEDGE information into my wedge tests - which worked, but unfortunately MPlay doesn't have a way of displaying that over the image (next to the other image information). However you can use iinfo to pop out the comment... and possibly even subsequently use hwatermark to burn it onto the picture too.

And another little word of warning - hwatermark will only save 8bit images. You'll see your watermarked file sizes will be a lot smaller than your original. This is also not a problem since you're never going to deliver an image with this annotation on it but just so you know.

[daniel.phillis]

hi

how would one write render times and other useful stats to disk with a post-frame render script ?

or do i have to learn bash / python ?

cheers

Daniel Phillis