Hi Forum,

I am not sure this is the right place to adress this thing, but it looks like the Vertex Animation Tool is not working in Houdini 17. When trying to bake a textere an error in RENDER_POSITION node stops the process:

Python error: Traceback (most recent call last):
File “”, line 5, in
File “DProgram Files/Side Effects Software/Houdini 17.0.352/houdini/python2.7libs\hou.py”, line 19438, in getPixelByUV
return _hou.CopNode_getPixelByUV(*args, **kwargs)
OperationFailed: The attempted operation failed.
Could not open the COP node

Checked this in a fresh setup as well as in the old projects where I baked without any problems. Can someone please check and confirm that this is not only my PC issue?

I've just submitted a fix. Some of the parameter names lost their connection when using the HDA in 17.

Mike

mikelyndon-sesi
I've just submitted a fix. Some of the parameter names lost their connection when using the HDA in 17.

Mike

awesome thank you very much mike sensei!
will this update be available throught the update toolset function in the game developement toolset ?
kindly
Dominic

Yay! Thank you very much!

mikelyndon-sesi
I've just submitted a fix. Some of the parameter names lost their connection when using the HDA in 17.

Mike

Is there any way to fix this on our end for the time being, or should we just stick to 16.5 for now.. How would we know when its fixed?

Thanks.

I fixed it in the 16.5 branch. The latest daily build of the gamedev toolset will have the changes.

mikelyndon-sesi
I fixed it in the 16.5 branch. The latest daily build of the gamedev toolset will have the changes.

Thank you!

You specified 16.5, just to be clear, as of this post, if one wants to export vertex animation, and you have 17 installed, you have to use 16.5/grab the latest daily build of the gamedev toolset — or can you use the 16.5 build and use it for 17?

No big deal, as 17 just rolled out. But just wanted to clear that up.

Since I had the same question about what I should do with the fix in the 16.5 branch while running 17 I thought I would clarify for anyone else as noobish as me.

I tried updating manually using the 16.5 branch. No joy when running 17 - same error message.

I clicked the Update Toolset game tool icon to auto-update within Houdini. I unchecked production builds and updated to 1.64. Restarted Houdini and… the Vertex Animation Texture tool (now conveniently named VAT just to throw you off the scent) popped up in it's former glory. Haven't done a full test, but at least step one is unblocked now.

Thanks for the fix. Now back to blowin' stuff up.

The fix allowed the VAT tool to launch, and it writes out what looks to be a good .fbx but then fails with error
“
Error
Error rendering child: /out/vertex_animation_textures1/RENDER_POSITION1
”

To weed out my more complex scene as the source of the error, I did a basic pig drop. The .hip file is enclosed

Logged a bug with support and they responded. The error was due to my not specifying extensions to the exported textures. The path must include a .exr or other appropriate file extension. When I made that change, the tool ran fine.

HBS-Houdini-User
Logged a bug with support and they responded. The error was due to my not specifying extensions to the exported textures. The path must include a .exr or other appropriate file extension. When I made that change, the tool ran fine.

heh, isn't that the worst…

Thanks for the update!

Good day to all! I'm making some tests of VA Tool for the first time. I have simple scene of vellum cloth patch dropping onto sphere, doing all steps from the tutorial (Vertex Animation GDC Project Overview) but some things are unclear to me, the annotation in UE4 material says that i must have 5 custom UV channels but i see only 4 annotated uv outputs to connect to main material. What UV input must remain empty ? I suppose it's UV0, but i'm unsure The second question is orientation of the mesh. The cloth patch mesh imported in vertical position ,the animation looks weird. Is is something with the axis i think, but i can't fix it, the convert scene option in import settings has no effect. Can you help me ? Houdini 17.0.387 , toolset v. 1.68

Thanks !

Just in case anybody else is googling this error code in H17, I also get it when my “Target Texture Size” is too small. I had a bullet sim with about 300,000 triangles and the VAT keep failing with this cryptic error message until I bumped the “Target Texture Size” to 8192.

Hi! I am new to houdini.

I know this is an old post but I have the same problem than iceBar0n. I am using Houdini 18 with unreal engine 4.25

The script generated by houdini for soft body tells me to have 5 Custom UVs.

And I don't know what gives me this kind of result.



So if anyone has an idea on how I could fix that, it would be SOOOO much appreciated.

Thank you