Guest xionmark Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 Also, maybe I missed that information somewhere but is it possible to have a different object instanced per point, i.e. to be able to set the geo_file per instance point? Also, keep in mind this project was intended more for teaching than production use, what we need is a proper set of render time "clustering" tools from SESI ... ;-O Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lisux Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 Also, keep in mind this project was intended more for teaching than production use, what we need is a proper set of render time "clustering" tools from SESI ... ;-O Jeje I just asked the same thing to Christin and Jeff alst time they visited us. We need a couple of procedurals for Mantra, one that replicates what copy stamp is doing but at render time, and another specific for points instancing to get a solution similar to Krakatoa. Mark have you used your cluster tool in production? Is it possible to do what Francois asked? Cheers! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Fran Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 Also, keep in mind this project was intended more for teaching than production use, what we need is a proper set of render time "clustering" tools from SESI ... ;-O Of course that should be part of a standard Houdini distribution but I think clusterThis is not missing much for geometry instancing. With the following I think it would work great. -Usage of an Up vector combined with N or an orient attribute or rot. -Geometry file name per point -More control on motion blur, i.e. centered, backward and forward motion blur. I haven't tested if object cast motion blured shadow neither but I think that's about it. François Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 Jeje I just asked the same thing to Christin and Jeff alst time they visited us. We need a couple of procedurals for Mantra, one that replicates what copy stamp is doing but at render time, and another specific for points instancing to get a solution similar to Krakatoa. Mark have you used your cluster tool in production? Is it possible to do what Francois asked? Cheers! Ola Pablo! Yes, it has been used in production by others and was used as a starting point for more elaborate versions (which is what I had hoped for). It really needs another cleanup pass and some time is needed on determining the differences in deferred instancing, there's something screwy going on with the way attributes are handled in that "mode", I just never had time to dig into it completely. Indeed it is possible to do what Francois mentioned, and is in fact mostly done. I wanted to finish the threading of the attribute code (this is where much time is spent in most of the test cases) but got off track the last few months by badly managed gigs ... the vfx world is pretty messed right now ... However, there's a window of time opening up this month to do a short animation that my friends want to do, and it could use some cluster goodness. The other thing I want to do is make the CVEX processing more "generic" to allow more flexibility in the way you can process attributes. It's a never ending list ... :-) --Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 -Usage of an Up vector combined with N or an orient attribute or rot. -Geometry file name per point -More control on motion blur, i.e. centered, backward and forward motion blur. Yep, lets' do it! I've got a short anim I want to work on with some friends, will be a fun excuse to dig into this code again. Will email you off list with a few questions. --Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
lisux Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 Ola Pablo! Yes, it has been used in production by others and was used as a starting point for more elaborate versions (which is what I had hoped for). It really needs another cleanup pass and some time is needed on determining the differences in deferred instancing, there's something screwy going on with the way attributes are handled in that "mode", I just never had time to dig into it completely. Indeed it is possible to do what Francois mentioned, and is in fact mostly done. I wanted to finish the threading of the attribute code (this is where much time is spent in most of the test cases) but got off track the last few months by badly managed gigs ... the vfx world is pretty messed right now ... However, there's a window of time opening up this month to do a short animation that my friends want to do, and it could use some cluster goodness. The other thing I want to do is make the CVEX processing more "generic" to allow more flexibility in the way you can process attributes. It's a never ending list ... :-) --Mark Sounds good. I am currently doing some stuff that will need instancing, I am using just copy for the moment to test things, but at some point I have to figure out the instancing and cludterThis could be an option. Wondering if I will have time to sig into the code Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted July 5, 2011 Share Posted July 5, 2011 (edited) Gene Frenkle: And I'd be doing myself a disservice and every member of this band, if I didn’t perform the HELL out of this! Bruce Dickinson: Guess what? I got a fever! And the only prescription.. is more cowbell! http://snltranscripts.jt.org/99/99pcowbell.phtml http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/719364/ Edited July 6, 2011 by xionmark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mzigaib Posted October 22, 2011 Share Posted October 22, 2011 Hello, I just tried to install this dso but I could not find in the rar, the only so was on the Linux folder, and every time I tried to use this it says that is a unknown operator type. How could I make this work? Thanks. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mzigaib Posted October 23, 2011 Share Posted October 23, 2011 Anyone? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted October 23, 2011 Share Posted October 23, 2011 Hello, I just tried to install this dso but I could not find in the rar, the only so was on the Linux folder, and every time I tried to use this it says that is a unknown operator type. How could I make this work? Thanks. I'm guessing that if you're getting this error, you have installed the DSO in the wrong location. This DSO is for mantra, not Houdini. Look up how to use mantra procedurals in the docs for more info. --Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Hi everyone, I've just about got all the changes done for H12 and need a few testers to help out with final testing. I'll be adding some threading, slicing (and other enhancements) next to help performance so I'd like to find a couple of people to try push the limits of what we can squeeze out of mantra. Thanks! Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
efx Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Sounds very very interesting!! Pls let me try!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Green-Man Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Hi everyone, I've just about got all the changes done for H12 and need a few testers to help out with final testing. I'll be adding some threading, slicing (and other enhancements) next to help performance so I'd like to find a couple of people to try push the limits of what we can squeeze out of mantra. Thanks! Mark Good news! I've ported a part of code of H11 version "clusterThis" to H12. And now it's very interesting for me to test your code with such a great new features. Do you plan to share it like previous version? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Good news! I've ported a part of code of H11 version "clusterThis" to H12. And now it's very interesting for me to test your code with such a great new features. Do you plan to share it like previous version? Yes, it's all open source goodness. There's some things I've learned from writing a few more of these over the last few years so I want to try get some of those features into the public's hands. I've also created a version of this clustering DSO that is for point instancing alone, soon to be updated for H12. So much capability in the CVEX hooks, it's been a major help in creating a number of cool effects, especially instancing geo files and the deforming them on the fly (think jungles and schooling fish). What I'm looking forward to is seeing how much the H12 improvements help performance, Stay tuned. <--(*)Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Erik_JE Posted September 9, 2012 Share Posted September 9, 2012 Maybe you could put the code on github? Then whoever wan't can clone, compile and test it. Maybe even help out with small stuff that could be pulled into master later? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted September 10, 2012 Share Posted September 10, 2012 Maybe you could put the code on github? Then whoever wan't can clone, compile and test it. Maybe even help out with small stuff that could be pulled into master later? Yep, all my open source code is going up on github, you can grab the code here: https://github.com/digital-cinema-arts But things are still in process so there will be a few hiccups now and then until I get it all updated and cleaned up. The OTL isn't on github yet but will be in a day or two, you'll need that to run the DSO correctly, --Mark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted September 21, 2012 Share Posted September 21, 2012 new version (2.0.0) for H12 available at: http://www.digitalcinemaarts.com/software/clusterthis/ Source on github: https://github.com/digital-cinema-arts/clusterThis Will have update on all issues and bugs/fixes over the weekend, and more examples. Suffice to say lots of bugs fixed, things (almost) finished that never had time for earlier, yet still questions remain on the performance when using the addProcedural() (creating children procedurals) that I thought be fixed in H12, but doesn't seem so. I also would love to get extreme testing from others too, needs production hardening. Enjoy! Spread the Good Vibes! Happy Equinox. --Mark P.S. For Linux 64bit only right now .. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 (edited) Greetings, * beta release 2.1 ready for your enjoyment. There's now a number of changes in the clusterThis mantra DSO (major surgery underway) that has made some serious improvements in performance and capability, many of which I had relied on CVEX in the past but that became cumbersome with the ever changing number of parameters/attributes (and thus arrays) needed to pass to the CVEX/VEX code with each project. I have a scheme that will make the interface to the CVEX feature more flexible, but I really wanted to introduce some new ideas and features as well as fold in some stuff from other projects (and that are now beyond the reach of an NDA agreement). The most exciting thing added to the project is the use of Open VDB libraries and tools (http://www.openvdb.org/) for various processing of the data, modulating attributes (velocity and normal vectors right now, much more to come) and geometry position/scale/etc. In it's current implementation, there's access to Open VDB's filtering and most of control over how the data is created and used. AS such, you'll need to have the Open VDB libraries on your system (they are included in the distribution archive). New features: * radius point attribute - if this attribute is present in the incoming point cloud, it will be used instead of the global radius parameter in the GUI * vdb_radius point attribute - a required attribute to set the radius of the rasterization by the Open VDB ParticleToLevelSet() function. * Open VDB for preprocessing and post-processing of the geometry. The interface uses the same parameters as in the DW_OpenVDBFromParticles SOP. In addition there are controls to apply the influence of the volume data for position, velocity, and normals. The filter switches are there an initial implementation but will soon have similar controls as the DW_OpenVDBLevelSetFilter SOP. * Per point geometry file instancing. Temporarily disabled until we create a geo queue/cache, there's way too much disk thrashing with instance counts are high. * Added mersenne twister noise. Someone requested in the past, but it doesn't seem to different than the alligator noise already implemented. Compiled for Linux (64 bit), example files and documentation: http://www.digitalci...re/clusterthis/ On Git Hub: https://github.com/digital-cinema-arts/clusterThis/tree/REL2.1 The end of the month milestone is to get to release 2.5 with all the new features fully implemented, tested and with examples. Video tutorials are next as some of this can be a bit complex to setup and get running, plus there's tips about things to avoid. Time permitting we'll have a handful of QT movies with various applications in real production scenarios. Take care, Mark Edited November 24, 2012 by xionmark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest xionmark Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 (edited) Here's a simple example movie using VDB for post processing: http://www.digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/clusterThis/mov/01_point_instancing_VDB.mov Edited November 28, 2012 by xionmark Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
oslo Posted November 24, 2012 Share Posted November 24, 2012 (edited) In the compiled version http://www.digitalci...re/clusterthis/ you lost otls. Please add Edited November 24, 2012 by oslo Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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