Combine pixie into Houdini

ArticleDirectory

• Mantra
• Pixie
• Houdini
• Renderfarm

Pixie is a famous open-source renderman Renderer implementation that supports motion blur, photon mapping, irradiance cahce and other popular features. Sidefx Houdini is also a well-known special effect tool. It has been applied to the production of special effects in movies. Especially under the leadership of Japanese animation master Koo kayang, the Japanese CG industry has been quite mature in using Houdini. I have summarized how to use pixie in the Houdini process and precautions, including Soho, and hope to help you.

Mantra

First, mention mantra. Its biggest characteristic is that it is very good and powerful, and it is not pornographic or violent. It supports both the traditional micropolygon-based rendering mode and Physically Based Rendering mode, and micropolygon physical-based rendering mode, which is basically equivalent to a renderman with pbrt. However, Mantra requires authorization. It is not provided only when Houdini is purchased. If it is apprentice, a bunch of messy bugs are not mentioned. It cannot be used for commercial purposes and the resolution is limited. Mantra development is also changing with each passing day, and the internal version is new every day. Therefore, for mantra, we can release it for the moment and try again when necessary.

Pixie

Pixie is a perfect good thing. It used the demo animation of a UC Berkeley CFD paper, called a semi-Lagrangian modeling method for fluid simulation. The latest version is 2.2.4. the features are not discussed. The main bugs currently exist, on the Win32 platform, when the interpolateboundary tag is enabled for the Catmull-Clark subdivide mesh, the memory will soar and rendering starts from 1 GB. It is reported that this problem is not solved on other platforms. The computation results of ambient occlusion are still not as smooth as prman 13.5. According to my communication with the author last year, the current new version of the compiler should have supported the shader generated by Pixar slim. Aqsis has also transitioned to version 1.4, adding display servers similar to Pixar it for management results, similar to the kind of GUI of entropy and NVIDIA gelato, but it is still very simple.

Houdini

Starting from H9 +, a group of Python APIs such as SOHO are provided to operate nodes inside the software to export data to the target Renderer, and C ++ is gradually replaced by python. Although Python has an advantage, I still hold a 60% positive attitude towards it, because so far there are no test reports on Python's massive data operations, assume that the memory is not released due to the 10 Gb export.ProgramWhat should we do if the crash occurs. H9 + has built-in support for renderman Renderer such as air 3.0/4.0 and prman 12.5/13.5. The output driver name is/driver/rib. We will expand our support step by step based on this. Hdk can also be used to re-write a ROP node, but it is very troublesome. This method is not convenient and is not recommended. Otloplibshoprib. OTL is used to generate rib in H9 +. You can use hotl to edit the OTL file or generate a new copy in Houdini. However, it should be noted that manual modification to the hexadecimal editor such as ultraedit and winhex will make OTL unidentifiable, because the OTL index header also needs to be changed.

• Create a new renderman node in the out
• Right-click the node, select operator type manager, and click Copy.

• In the displayed dialog box, modify the name and save path.

• So we can use this new ROP in the current hip.

Note that the built-in export function of Houdini is still called at this time. To fully match the pixie features, you must manually write a script for the pixie features. Otherwise, the exported rib cannot be rendered. The Rendering Control Interface is instantly generated by the Tcl \ TK script in OTL. This ROP calls rib. py, which is located under $ home/houdini9.1/Soho/(I am using version 9.1 apprentice ). The Renderer name is passed into ribsettings. py as a parameter to check whether there is a Python script that matches the Renderer. If not found, the rib of prman12.5 is output and a warning comment is added at the beginning of rib.

 

Target = Drop. getdefaultedstring ( " Target " , Now ,[ " Prman12.5 " ])
Thetarget = Target
Targetfile =   " Rib "   + Target [0] +   " . Py "  
File = Findpyfile (targetfile)

Therefore, we need to crop the options in the existing pixie drop-down node, leaving only the options for Pixie. Then, manually write the script corresponding to the specified version features. With this idea, we can create Houdini as a scenario description generator that supports any Renderer, such as indigo for Houdini. My tests show that the inline archieve pixie exported by Houdini cannot be identified, and pixie supports limited subdivide surfaces. Houdini automatically adds the shadow map pass to rib. However, you must set the shadow type of the light to depth shadow maps. Note that bias is not set in Houdini, so the rendering result is incorrect. To add features, manual hack Houdini scripts are required.CodeAlthough this is not allowed, you have to do so.

Renderfarm

If financial support permits, consider frantic film deadline, or manually write tools similar to Pixar Alfred for internal processes.