mantra "clusterThis" procedural geometry DSO

[Guest xionmark]

Cool.

I'm sure the Houdini community would appreciate anything you might offer as well.

It's a great place to hang out.

Mark

[TiMc]

Hey Mark,

This is a really great tool and I'm a bit annoyed that I've only just got around to taking a look at it.

I was just wondering if there is a way to alter radius or the offset on a per particle basis or if it would

be best to do this in VEX?

[Guest xionmark]

Hey Mark,

This is a really great tool and I'm a bit annoyed that I've only just got around to taking a look at it.

I was just wondering if there is a way to alter radius or the offset on a per particle basis or if it would

be best to do this in VEX?

Yes, you can use pscale to alter the size of points or instanced primitives.

I've found a weird bug in the CVEX code and haven't nailed the actual problem yet, so I'm leaving that for another release. However, the next version has a couple of fixes that are long overdue. Should be out by Friday, I' having a few people testing it on some shots this last week.

Mark

[TiMc]

Great, thanks a lot Mark.

This really is a fantastic tool.

I've only just started playing with it but I was wondering how many points you think you would be able to render with it.

I'm messing around with the point instancing and I'm running out of memory on a 16gb machine at around 20,000,000 points.

What are the best settings to get more than this?

Thanks again for the great work.

[Guest xionmark]

I've only just started playing with it but I was wondering how many points you think you would be able to render with it.

I'm messing around with the point instancing and I'm running out of memory on a 16gb machine at around 20,000,000 points.

Hi,

Without seeing the scene file it's hard to say. For one, make sure you cull out any points out of frustrum, and be careful with the deferred instancing mode, it has benefits but can do some really strange things.

[Guest xionmark]

New update:

Houdini 9.5:

http://digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/clusterThis/download/mantra_clusterThis_v1.5.0_H9.5.379.tar.gz

Houdini 10:

http://digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/clusterThis/download/mantra_clusterThis_v1.5.0_H10.0.465.tar.gz

I'll write more detail tomorrow and get the MacOSX version built, have to get to sleep soon, but to summarize:

* Fixed primitive and file instancing orientation to normals.

* Added an external source geo file for source points.

* Fixed all the CVEX issues.

* Added pre and post CVEX processing.

* Added point and primitive CVEX processing for file instancing (to be able to do deformations, etc.)

* Refactored some code for optimization.

New example file, source code and CVEX code examples included.

Source docs:

http://digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/clusterThis/docs/index.html

Mark

[helium]

Hi,

I started my houdini in the terminal, and it said this error -

Houdini DSO - error on '/home/user/houdini10.0/dso/VRAY_clusterThis.so'

/home/user/houdini10.0/dso/VRAY_clusterThis.so: undefined symbol: _ZNK11VRAY_Volume8getXformER10UT_Matrix4

My machine is -

OS: Ubuntu 9.10 x64

Kernel: 2.6.31-20-generic

GCC: 4.4

Houdini: 10.0.465 x64 gcc4.1

Both the default dso from the package and the one I compiled, have such error.

Does anyone know this problem? Thanks very much.

[Guest xionmark]

Hi,

I started my houdini in the terminal, and it said this error -

My machine is -

OS: Ubuntu 9.10 x64

Kernel: 2.6.31-20-generic

GCC: 4.4

Houdini: 10.0.465 x64 gcc4.1

Both the default dso from the package and the one I compiled, have such error.

Does anyone know this problem? Thanks very much.

Hello,

This DSO is for mantra, not Houdini, so it needs to be in (for example) $HOME/houdiniX.X/dso/mantra/ instead of $HOME/houdiniX.X/dso/. The DSO is called by mantra at render time.

Mark

[katisss]

I compiled for win32/houdini 10.0249

to have a play... no waranties.

http://www.lo-motion.de/mel/VRAY_clusterThis_win32_houd10.rar

Edited July 4, 2010 by katisss

[Fran]

I'm trying to compile it on Windows 64-bit but I can't figure out how to make the nmake work. I only have a little experience in compiling C++ but I've managed to compile the sop_Star.C example with hcustom.

Now if I try to type nmake in the directory where the MakeFile provided in the source is, I've got the error: "fatal error U1001: syntax error : illegal character '{' in macro Stop"

In the MakeFile I saw SHELL=/bin/csh so do I have to run nmake inside csh?

I saw somewhere we can type csh in the Houdini console but I cannot list my directory so I'm not even able to access pwd.

How can I compile this plugin for Windows?

Thanks

François

[JoshJ]

I'm trying to compile on windows 7 64 bit also. (I've successfully compiled the star sop as well as HOT on this system) Running from Houdini command line tools, already set the MSVCDir along with running vcvarsall.bat for both x86 and 64, tried using make and <hcustom -g -i . VRAY_clusterThis.C> to compile it, both result in the following error messages:

Reason: cannot convert from 'int' to 'const GB_AttributeRef' Constructor for class 'GB_AttributeRef' is declared 'explicit' <...path...>VRAY_clusterThisChild.C(484) : error C2664

I just get long lists of those types of error messages over and over then it stops.

[pclaes]

You should mention which version of houdini you are trying to compile for.

H11 introduced a lot of changes in regards to working with attributes, specifically that 'int' to 'const GB_AttributeRef' refers to that. Nothing too hard, but there are quite a bit of attributes supported by the clusterthis, so I can imagine it will take a bit of time to get it all sorted out. Some of the changes are not backwards compatible.

[Fran]

I use Windows 7 too but for now I just want to compile for 10.0.554.

Do I have to create my own MakeFile or I should be able to use the one provided with the source?

[JoshJ]

Thanks Pclaes, I see, indeed it was for H11.

[lisux]

I haven't use cluster This before and I am curioous abouit the adventages of using this tool rather than the usual point instancing in Mantra.

Anyway the project looks really cool, so thanks Mark for it.

[Fran]

Point instancing is very slow when you start to have a lot of points. It keeps saying "Evaluating Python"...

But I haven't played with it yet but I get the feeling it's very fast and can be a better solution for volumetric compared to metaball because you don't have to pre-bake your points every time etc.

[Ratman]

I use Windows 7 too but for now I just want to compile for 10.0.554.

Do I have to create my own MakeFile or I should be able to use the one provided with the source?

I had some trouble using the MakeFile provided, I ended up rolling my own.

Something along the lines of:

DSONAME = VRAY_clusterThis.dll

SOURCES = *all the sources and header files, starting with VRAY_clusterThis.C*

$HFS/toolkit/makefiles/Makefile.gnu

Compiled it in Windows 7 using Cygwin and sources the houdini_setup file.

Hope this helps!

[Ratman]

Point instancing is very slow when you start to have a lot of points. It keeps saying "Evaluating Python"...

But I haven't played with it yet but I get the feeling it's very fast and can be a better solution for volumetric compared to metaball because you don't have to pre-bake your points every time etc.

Isn't this mainly a Soho and python issue?

I've talked with a few people with the same complain when doing point instancing, that it takes far too long to generate the ifds, which is a shame.

[Fran]

Isn't this mainly a Soho and python issue?

I've talked with a few people with the same complain when doing point instancing, that it takes far too long to generate the ifds, which is a shame.

I think too it's because Soho and Python. I'd be curious to test with an old Houdini to see if was that slow before Python came into Houdini. If it's the case it's bad to lose performance

François

[lisux]

Point instancing is very slow when you start to have a lot of points. It keeps saying "Evaluating Python"...

But I haven't played with it yet but I get the feeling it's very fast and can be a better solution for volumetric compared to metaball because you don't have to pre-bake your points every time etc.

Would be good to have some light here about how SOHO creates the IFD.

One of the good things of instancing is that you don't have to put your instanced geo in the IFD/RIB file, just the points, and the instanced geo once. So I don't really understand why SOHO takes much time to do it.