Houdini render pipeline
Quote from Magnus on 7. March 2019, 10:20Hi,
So we are finally rendering our short film. It's been a steep learning curve using houdini for scene assembly and render for the first time, but now everything is starting to run smooth, and I can see that the time investement has definitively been worth it, as we can easily reuse the tools we have built.
There are just a few small things that I would love to see in Prism to ease the rendering pipieline:
- Adding 'render with take' override in the render state. My workaround at the moment is to make one rop for each take and link each rop to a seperate render state, but it's very messy and prone to human errors. If it was included in the render state I could have just a single rop.
- It would be great to be able to fetch the framerange from an attribute - OR have setting to 'fetch frame range from ROP'. This makes it so that I can fetch the time range per shot from my shot manager HDA.
- Output as PNG. I do most of the 'comp' work (values, color etc) directly in the renderview, so I rarely need the range that exr offer. With png the image quality is still good but the filesizes are much smaller in general, which is great when doing a lot of fast comp scenes as after effects can work a lot faster which is vital when crunching out many shots a day. (I think many small studios can relate)
- Not directly related to Houdini, but I'll add it here anyways. It would be awesome if there was some way to set the quality for the mp4 conversion. I love how it works now for playblasts, but for quickly making a movie file out of a rendered image seq it's way too low quality - would this be possible?
Best,
Magnus
Hi,
So we are finally rendering our short film. It's been a steep learning curve using houdini for scene assembly and render for the first time, but now everything is starting to run smooth, and I can see that the time investement has definitively been worth it, as we can easily reuse the tools we have built.
There are just a few small things that I would love to see in Prism to ease the rendering pipieline:
- Adding 'render with take' override in the render state. My workaround at the moment is to make one rop for each take and link each rop to a seperate render state, but it's very messy and prone to human errors. If it was included in the render state I could have just a single rop.
- It would be great to be able to fetch the framerange from an attribute - OR have setting to 'fetch frame range from ROP'. This makes it so that I can fetch the time range per shot from my shot manager HDA.
- Output as PNG. I do most of the 'comp' work (values, color etc) directly in the renderview, so I rarely need the range that exr offer. With png the image quality is still good but the filesizes are much smaller in general, which is great when doing a lot of fast comp scenes as after effects can work a lot faster which is vital when crunching out many shots a day. (I think many small studios can relate)
- Not directly related to Houdini, but I'll add it here anyways. It would be awesome if there was some way to set the quality for the mp4 conversion. I love how it works now for playblasts, but for quickly making a movie file out of a rendered image seq it's way too low quality - would this be possible?
Best,
Magnus
Quote from RichardF on 7. March 2019, 23:50Simple answer: Yes
All points are clear and make completely sense.
One workaround for the framerange would be to lock the frame parameters on the rop node so Prism cannot overwrite them.
I updated the feature list:
- Takes are already in the list [0015]
- Use Rop framerange: [0091]
- Output png is already in the list [0038]
- Video quality: [0092]
I'm quite busy at the moment, so please don't expect all things to be ready tomorrow 🙂
Simple answer: Yes
All points are clear and make completely sense.
One workaround for the framerange would be to lock the frame parameters on the rop node so Prism cannot overwrite them.
I updated the feature list:
- Takes are already in the list [0015]
- Use Rop framerange: [0091]
- Output png is already in the list [0038]
- Video quality: [0092]
I'm quite busy at the moment, so please don't expect all things to be ready tomorrow 🙂