Takes and a real state of things...

[fxrod]

Takes are incredibly powerful, especially in a lighting pipeline. You can easily set different rendering parameters per lighting pass without too much trouble. You can also script these takes so that they are automatically built for users. But, I agree with everyone about usability.

Looking at the take list is not always the clearest. For example, if I have an operator with 100 parms, and 50 of those parms are active in a take, I have to know the name of the channel and NOT the label. So, I end up having to scroll over each parm to find out which one is being set. A take inspector would be good. Maybe selecting the parm in the take list will cause the parm to glow/blink/call attention to itself on the operator.

Since they came out, I've been harping on one main thing: Lack of a Takes Spreadsheet so you can visually see what values are set to what in each take, together.

I also think Peter's idea is brilliant, especially when dealing with nested takes.

[jason_slab]

one thing i do feel is, takes feel pretty much "locked" in to a specific hip file, this becomes a bit of a pain when using otls to set up shots.

what i'd like to see is a take node, something that you can include inside in otl's, this would feel more like a houdini workflow to me!

at the moment i need to set pre-render scripts using oparm and opset, to get around not using takes, which works really well, but it would be nice if it was as quick as takes to setup.

jason

Edited June 29, 2009 by jason_slab

[stevenong]

I recently had 2 scenes with 6-7 takes in each, and I noticed when I merged the files it seemed to blow them away. It would be cool if there was some way to control this (although I do realize it is a marginal situation .. it took a lot of time to recreate those takes).

-ranxx

one thing i do feel is, takes feel pretty much "locked" in to a specific hip file, this becomes a bit of a pain when using otls to set up shots.

what i'd like to see is a take node, something that you can include inside in otl's, this would feel more like a houdini workflow to me!

at the moment i need to set pre-render scripts using oparm and opset, to get around not using takes, which works really well, but it would be nice if it was as quick as takes to setup.

jason

You can save takes out to disk & load them into another file. There are some limitations with object names being the same etc but it does work. I agree there should be a better mechanism for this but the basic functions are there.

@ranxerox, I'm too late with this reply but hope it will save you some grief in the future if you need to merge hip files again. RMB on the Take or Parent Take & select Save Take or Save Take (and children).

Cheers!

steven

[lisux]

Personally, I don't think Takes should be used to mimic animation layers. Pretty soon, you will want to do more advanced things than simple compositing operations. What then? Create a Take OP context? But we already have a flexible animation layering context, it's called CHOPs. IMHO, the right way to do animation layering in Houdini is to add a better GUI to CHOPs, not add more infrastructure to Takes.

Absolutely agree that CHOPs is the way to go in the animation field, and with a good interface, intuitive for animators (which is not easy), is a more powerful system that any other in the industry for this task.

But the idea of having weights per take, which I think doesn't mean to convert takes in a mess, for me is a really useful thing and makes sense.

At the end the concept of layers, as you can see them in photoshop, maya or xsi for different things sometimes is really useful, takes is pretty close to it.

If you can have a layered Fetch CHOP or Channel CHOP will be really useful, you can actually do it with nodes, but for animators nodes is a different history.

Following Dragos suggestion being able to fetch channels from other takes, or even create a copy of channel asd an spare parameter and blend this copy with the original one using CHOPs could be approximaions to layered animation in Houdini.

my 2 cents