I've been working with the Animation Impostors tool but I've ran into a few issues, I'm currently using Houdini Core 16.5.439
1- Baking an animation impostor on the latest version (1.22) fails due to a cook error in input: BEAUTY. I did a little debugging and it appears that the individual frame/angle renders are not being named correctly so the animation cop network cannot find the correct file paths. The default output picture variable is $HIP/render/${OS}_${WEDGE}.$F4.exr so I would expect to see something like rop_impostor_texture1._wedge_rotation_45.001.exr in the $HIP/render path, but instead I see rop_impostor_texture1.0001.exr. This looks like the wedge rotation is not being correctly appended to the file path. I've attached a test file for this.
2- The geometry bounds the camera renders are updated per frame. For example if I have an animation where the character raises their arms into the air, the character will shrink in the render due to bounds of the character changing. By modifying the impostor camera rig hda (removing the expression from the translate z and ortho width of cam_animation) I can remove this behavior, but this means I have to modify the hda consistently. Ideally I’d like an override option on the camera rig or impostor node so I can set these values myself without needing to modify the hda
3- Base color and normals map only render one frame when baking animation.
4- It would also be super useful to have the option to skip every ‘nth’ frame. This would give me the ability to render only half the frames of an animation using less texture memory without needing to modify animations externally.
Finally, as a quality of life update, would it be possible to have a shelf button for impostor textures that creates the impostor node and the camera rig and assigns them to each other? I could make this for myself but I think it would be great to have as a default shelf button
Thanks!
