I have Houdini 16.0.640 - the full version and am using Redshift Demo 2.5.29 plugin version 16.0.633 .

I’m following a Rohan Dalvi tutorial for redshift (https://vimeo.com/178602203). The tutorial hip file is ‘Limited Commercial', it opens Houdini in ‘Indie Limited Commercial’ mode.

When in the IPR render view I can render using redshift once. Then when I try to render a second time I get an error “Output driver not supported in Apprentice version”.

I posted on the Redshift forum about this and got the following answer:

Hi,

I’ve seen this problem before. As far as I know, the problem is related to the fact that the Houdini full version can’t work with the Houdini Indie scenes (limited commercial .hiplc files). You can open these files with the full version, check them and even render them, but as soon as you modify anything, the scene internally becomes not commercial (apprentice .hipnc file). You can check it yourself: if you modify anything in a .hiplc scene and try to save it from the full Houdini version, it will be saved as .hipnc file.

So, once the scene internally is in non-commercial apprentice mode, something that can happen even after the first render, the scene can’t be rendered anymore because the apprentice version doesn’t support external renderers. You only can use the MPlay IPR, but all the render view, render region and all the RS ROP render functions will be disabled.

Hope this helps,
-Juanjo

Why would Houdini give me this error? It clearly shows in the Houdini title bar as “Houdini Indie Limited-Commercial” so it is not in Apprentice mode at all and therefore the plugin should be working, right?

Try building a new scene from scratch.
Drop down a box, a light, a camera and an output ROP.

niczoom
Why would Houdini give me this error?

Do you have an Indie license? Overall it sounds like a mechanism to stop Indie files being used in a Full Commercial license pipeline.

Sorry, I should have mentioned. Building a new scene from scratch using the Redshift ROP and IPR are fine, I don't get the above error.

@aRtye - I have the full version of Houdini, no Indie license. You must be right regarding your above statement.

But in saying that Houdini starts in LC (indie) mode but the error mentions the Apprentice version, which it's clearly not running. I'm not saving the scene at all just following the tutorial.

A lot of tutorials use ‘.HIPLC’ and they work fine, it just must be some restriction regarding the Redshift Output ROP in this example.

Rendering using MPlay works, this is either via the IPR button in the Redshift shelf tab or the ‘Open IPR’ button in the Redshift_ROP.

Redshift IPR rendering within Houdini itself, either via the ‘Render View Panel’ or using the ‘Render Region Tool’ does not work, this is where the error “Output driver not supported in Apprentice version” occurs.