I am new to Houdini and would really appreciate some advice regarding the Houdini > After Effects workflow.
My usual workflow involves rendering multiple file sequences from Maya and compositing them in Adobe After Effects. I would normally render a Luminance Depth pass, Shadow pass, Specular pass etc.

I am using Houdini on a project for the first time; and we started by rendering .exr images with extra image planes from Houdini and extracting the channels in After Effects, but I found that the files made AE so slow that it was unworkable.
We then tried rendering tif files and saving the image planes as separate file sequences. This is fine for the beauty pass, but the Zdepth pass would need to be created as a greyscale image to be useable (I understand that tif files dont have a zdepth channel). We also found that many of the tif files were unreadable in After Effects (they seemed to be corrupted / half written).
I am basically hoping for some advice as to a workable Houdini > After Effects workflow. What file type would be best (tiff, tga, 16 bit interger, 16 bit float etc?)
Thank you in advance.

Hi,
Have you just tried rendering straight .exr files without the extra channels.

Rob

AFX is indeed very slow with multi-layer OpenEXR.
This might help: http://www.fnordware.com/OpenEXR/ [fnordware.com]

TIFF as individual files should also work. Try the various TIFF compression options in the Output Options tab of the Mantra ROP.

Dragos

Hi Gamm,

It is not the EXR format itself that is probably giving pains to AE, but the compression type that is set for EXR in Houdini by default. Try changing “PIZ Wavelet” into “ZIP, single scanline” on the “Output Options” tab of the mantra render node.

Hope it helps,
Greg