hi,
is there any chance in the future, to export shaders from VOP as a .fx file ?

Hey Michael,

Yeah man that would be very nice for the Game Developers out there. They would defantly go nuts over that.

Cheers,
Nate Nesler

sometimes I have the feeling that we are the only companie working with houdini in the game business :cry:

thats interesting, what part of the game pipeline to you use Houdini for? I think it's kind of odd that Houdini isn't used much in games, would you say it's because of the polygon modeling and unwrapping tools in other applications or simply the price?

I have seen some maxscript procedural game generation stuff could have easily been done with switch operations and copy stamping

I would think that there should be a lot of similarities between VOPs and mental mill (http://www.mentalimages.com/2_4_mentalmill/index.html [mentalimages.com]) except that VOPs has the further advantage of being able to generate code for more renderers and, to boot, its not limited to shading: it can generate composite, channel and geometry operations.

VOPs could almost be considered a CASE tool. I could imagine that VOPS may quite easily be able to modified to produce C++ source code to mimic these operations too.

I think the idea of using VOPs to generate HLSL has been raised a couple of times but I'm not sure where SESI stand on the matter currently. I always thought of it being an excellent way to design real-time shaders for effective previs in the feature film industry instead of for its obvious benefits in the game development process but why not kill two birds with one stone?

Maybe the secret is for SESI to open up custom development of VOPNET types more? Or if it is open already, to document it with samples. I remember rumour of outside custom development of Mental Ray vops - I wonder if that is still happening?

andrewlowell
thats interesting, what part of the game pipeline to you use Houdini for? I think it's kind of odd that Houdini isn't used much in games, would you say it's because of the polygon modeling and unwrapping tools in other applications or simply the price?

I have seen some maxscript procedural game generation stuff could have easily been done with switch operations and copy stamping

we use houdini for all model and texture work. after that we import the stuff to maya for characteranimation, because there is NO inexpensive way to export from houdini directly to a gameengine. ( witch is really no problem with maya or 3Dmax )….

concerning your question I think it is a mix of price and not enough users.

jason_iversen
I would think that there should be a lot of similarities between VOPs and mental mill (http://www.mentalimages.com/2_4_mentalmill/index.html [mentalimages.com]) except that VOPs has the further advantage of being able to generate code for more renderers and, to boot, its not limited to shading: it can generate composite, channel and geometry operations.

hi jason,
thanxs for link, very interesting.something like that would be very nice to have with VOPS.

I think the idea of using VOPs to generate HLSL has been raised a couple of times but I'm not sure where SESI stand on the matter currently. I always thought of it being an excellent way to design real-time shaders for effective previs in the feature film industry instead of for its obvious benefits in the game development process but why not kill two birds with one stone?

you are right, because real-time shaders are excellent for client previews.
you can change things on the flight without rerendering the hole scene.

I think that you can use opengl shaders with houdini 8, but it seems to in a beta/alpha state, look at this:
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=4404&hl=opengl [forums.odforce.net]
I havent found time to play with this.
But I hope that for H9 SESI made VOP a more general tool, like Jason have pointed, a CASE to tool to develop not only shaders, other operators too.
Furthermoe I think that houdini could a very powerful tool in games, but you know SESI is only film production

As someone who writes HLSL shaders at work, this has been of interest to me for a long time. I knew about the experimental GLSL 2.0 shaders a while ago but didn't have a graphics card that could do it at the time, or was it drivers?.. Can't remember.

But anyhow I think the word was on VOPs doing real-time shaders 2 years ago was that to do anything worthwhile with it, people needed graphics cards that could support Pixel Shader 3.0. (Nvidia 6000+ series) due to the limit of shader instructions that Pixel Shader 2.0 supported, etc. and at the time very few people had that, so they didn't think it was worth the time and effort to support it.

Plus HLSL is a Microsoft DirectX thing and they only considered OpenGL support (GLSL being the pixel shader language for OpenGL 2.0). People have hacked Maya's OpenGL in the past to use DirectX HLSL so I wonder how hard it could be to do for Houdini?..

But anyway, we do use Houdini in game creation at EA Tiburon (Orlando, Fl). Not directly, but some asset and texture creation and Prototyping and Pre-Vis. The more I show it to people the more they are fascinated and interested. I think Houdini's procedural paradigm could really be an answer to creating these huge complex “Next Gen” gaming worlds with the same crew sizes as “Current Gen” games.

Craig Hoffman
Visual Effects Director
EA Tiburon

I think it would be great to have OpenGL 2 hardware acceleration for shaders, SOPs and COPs (and even DOPs). The way I see this implemented is either
a) have a new context in VOPS (like RSL) for authoring real-time shaders (as I see in the parameters of the Shader SOP, there is already implemented an OpenGL2 context, not sure how to use it), OR
b) make VEX itself hardware-accelerated, if a suitable graphic card is present. I think mental ray can do that already.
The new G80 series from nvidia are becoming more useful as general purpose processors and it's a shame to have such processing power and not use it.
As an example, Piranha already makes possible to use custom OpenGL shaders in their high-end effects system. This is just an example of the power available http://www.ifx.com/piranha/cinema/ [ifx.com]

Dragos