renderman,entropy wierdness

[ectonaut]

Hi:

I just recently hooked up renderman 10 to houdini by entering some environment variables in my win 2000 system environment. When i preview something using renderman it renders fast and ugly with lots of banding!!!...this only happens the first time anytime afterwards it either takes an eternity or just displays that display window and hogs up my system recources.

I tried briefly to use the ROP's and changing the output to renderman and network renderman and I keep getting errors. I change the render command and write out the path explicitly in the render line...(where stuff goes if you don't have your variables set up). and still no

also i installed exluna entropy 3.1 and it works. so I put it in the environment variable called "path" and chose entropy 3.0 from a ROPS operator sub-menu and it won't render...I get a red error display flag.

I have mental ray also (that I use with maya) I want to see how that works out in houdini

dammit I really like houdini and renderman and want to get started loading my renderman shaders into houdini.

Can someone give me some tips on using houdini with 3rd party renderers namely renderman 10. also I hate that display window that pops up when using renderman preview I want to use "it" and all the cool features.

and yes I'm looking into vex and vops it's very renderman-like in a way.

Thanks in advance