Hi I am new to houdini and have been following a rohan delvi tutorial. I am trying to render my scene out in mantra but I keep getting this error

warning: Bad parameter reference: “enableDispMap” in parameter /ma/uniformvolume/vm_displacebound/floatdef.

I have no idea how to follow this path to the correct node. Can someone help me decipher this?

I think that should read /mat/uniformvolume/vm_displacebound/floatdef.

This means it's in /mat, (your material network) and it's pointing to the uniformvolume shader. If you mouse over each paramater, you will see it's real name, and you will eventually come to “vm_displacementbound”, (which is the displacement bound… tells mantra how far it can expect to displace the volume). There is something wrong with this expression, it looks like it is pointing to a parm that does not exist… just delete it for now.

I don't know though that this would cause your render to fail, these are usually benign errors.

I am getting this error as well, rendering a flip simulation. The uniformvolume shader is right out of the box. I didn't touch it. My scene will render with the errors using the film cannister button in the lower left corner of the Scene View, but rendering by pressing “render” on the mantra node fails. The weird thing is that it renders two frames, then fails on frame 3. After I did a “delete channel” on the displacement bound the problem went away. I'm on Centos 7, Houdini 17.0.352.

I think this problem might be due to running out of disk space on my root partition.

I don't think it's the disk space. I was having the same issue with my flip sim not rendering and giving this same error on a fresh reset computer but when I un-promoted the vm_displacebound it seemed to fix immediately. Posting this for anyone else that may run into the error later like I did.

Hmm the parameter references are indeed wrong. They are all missing “../” as they should refer to the enclosing material builder node. If you replace the expression with the following, the error goes away.

Ive copied and paste the expression, it still displays the same error. Any idea why?

Aha,I find why. This is bug for Uniform Volume node.

Default , This channel should be disable if you don't check Enable Displacement Map Channel.
But original node they have a mistake.
What ever you use or not this channel, Displacement Bound always want a value.


So easy to fix it.

1.right click in this material node.
2.find Displacement Bound(Vm_displacebound)
3.Use {enableDispMap==0 enableNoise==0} replace old expression
4.Done.

I'm a new Houdini user & I'm having the same issue. Tried everything mentioned here, but didn't work. This looks like a general problem, and I'm surprised that this page is the only one in the entire web that is trying to address it. Houdini is a complicated software, so if as a new user you get an error like this, you have no idea what to do. Any other ideas?

just change the parameter type from float to integer

boss.tleuli
just change the parameter type from float to integer

just ignore it, it doesn't matter.