Hi,

I just started on Houdini recently.

I am developing this scene (based on DT tutorial) where I have to develop a mousepen with mouses inside.

The thing is, when I do the the render-region or just plain render, only the mouses appear in the final image. I cannot render the mousepen (which is just a box) for some reason. I have went through the network, but cannot find anything wrong with it.

Help appreciated. Thanks

Check to make sure the render flag is on the right node in each of your sop networks. It's the purple flag.

You somehow added the point instancing parameter onto your object and turned it on. If you turn this off, it will render as expected.

hi,

what do you mean by purple flag? I know that blue is for display and pink is for template. If you mean the purple and blue circle inside the SOP network, yes…they are on the correct node so it should render out.

I can't edit my previous post, can't find the edit button or my browser is getting funky with me

Anyways Steve, thanks for the tip. I wonder how did that Instance parameter come about? I reference the points from the mousepen SOP but I use the Instance node in the POP network. ops:

May I also know the benefit of using the instance node ? I was told it was a fast way to preview your particles without rendering the shaded geometry etc etc. But isn't it the same thing as turning of wireframe mode. I tested both ways and the speed was the same

Thanks

sorry for anothe post. Not being able to edit my post is really annoying

I made a typo error in my previous post. What I was asking is isn't using instance mode to preview my particles the same thing as viewing them in wireframe mode?

Thanks

Instancing is really a whole subject on it's own… it can be useful for rendering copies of huge geometry efficiently. The benefits won't be particularly noticeable on simple geometry.

http://www.a3d.co.uk/images/delayed.htm [a3d.co.uk] is a cool read

When instancing a cube, you might not see a huge improvement when instancing over simply rendering it but the improvement will become more obvious as the complexity of the geometry increases to say that of a character or a vehicle. With Delayed Loads, the IFD (which is part of the rendering process) generation will be fast, the IFD will be smaller, and so network bandwidth is less.

Improvements happen because Mantra:

a) only needs to load the model from disk/IFD once
b) can ray-trace it without using additional memory per instance since the geometry may be shared between instances
c) is able to, in the case of micropolygon renders, share the base (prediced) geometry
d) not need to load the geometry if it is occluded or offscreen