Houdini at school


Houdini - What's different at school?

Houdini at school isn't all that different from stock Houdini, however there are a couple of things to note.

Color management

Color management is globally configured for all our applications at school and Houdini is no exception. Luckily you don't have to worry about this too much. Textures going into Houdini should already be in ACEScg and your renders will automatically be in ACEScg as well. Sometimes you might have to set some color transforms on textures, for which a reduced list of common options will be available in the regular image nodes.

Render engines

You'll see a big list of Houdini versions when you open the Windows start menu:

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By default external render engines are disabled when you open Houdini. In order to use those render engine you'll have to open the correct Houdini version that has the name of the render engine next to it.

Houdini launched using ShotGrid will look at the ShotGrid render engine setting to determine which render engines should be enabled when Houdini starts.

Extra tools

Depending on the Houdini version a couple of additional tools are available. The most notable of these are Axiom Solver and Groombear. Pretty much all of our custom Houdini tools are only available when working in our ShotGrid pipeline.

Houdini - Rendering on the farm

You'll probably want to render your Houdini projects on our render farm. First you need to make sure that all the files used in your Houdini file (and the Houdini file itself of course) are stored on our Storage server. You should also make sure the output path on your render settings is set to a location on our storage server, like this example:

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Next up you'll need to go over to the out network, this is where we hook up our Houdini nodes to the render farm. Create a fetch node and set the source to the node that should be used to render with, like this:

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Then add a deadline node and connect the fetch node to it:

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This node has a couple of parameters, most of which you can leave default. You should make sure your frame range is set properly and also make sure to change the job name to something descriptive. If your render is very lightweight you might want to change the concurrent tasks option in the Job Options tab to something a bit higher.

Make sure to set the frame range properly on both the deadline node and the fetched node that should be rendered.

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You can now submit your render to our farm by pressing the Submit To Deadline button.