Freakish

Thanks for the posts guys…..

Currently I love Houdini, H9 is such a nice upgrade i love the UI, unlike all the other programs, I never seem to need to click back and forth, or close 20 dialog boxes, everything i use it almost instantly available in the UI.

It's just the rendering side i would like to do some experiments with.
Mantra by default is a lot slower than i would like to see, and given time to know it's ins and outs, I'm sure i could customize it to work better for the specific given situations. However that will take time and know-how….

But at the moment if hit render for a test render, Mantra is dog SLOW compared to 3Delight. (and 3Delight isn't even using all my CPU's) However i cannot compare the advanced stuff, because i cannot get the 3Delight shaders to work with Houdini. (Only Mantra shaders)

I have written a few shaders in C, for Lightwave most of these were based on Renderman shaders, so Renderman/3Delight is something I'm interested in for shader writing experience and to further my knowledge.

Personally MR is overated for myself, however the people around me do prefer it for again the shader writing and wealth of MI shaders that can be added and made, also keep in mind upcoming ideas like MetaMill.
They also like the fact that it's used elsewhere in the pipeline.

Ideally i would like to give 3Delight, Mantra and Mental Ray a good work out for Houdini to see which is going to best suit our situation.

But given the fact that I'm having trouble getting 3Delight shaders working, I'm about ready to give up and just use Houdini to do the complex stuff and export it out to be rendered elsewhere.

Currently I do not have the amount of time i would like to sit with Houdini and really read all the docs and info and options, paths command line options etc…. So it's been a frustrating week!

Cheers, and thanks again for support and advice!

digitallysane
I don't quite get what the problem is. I downloaded 3Delight, installed it according to it's documentation, placed the provided OTL in my otls folder (this is well documented: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini9.1/assets/install [sidefx.com] ).
The shaders were readily available and I could render with 3Delight instantly.
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While i can render with 3Delight, I can not get any of the 3Delight shaders to show up in the material palette…

I have also copied the otl to my Houdini/Otls folder (these didn't appear to do anything) and also added it manually (and i see the names of the shaders eg ‘Shop/Wood’ I click accept….

And after that i hoped in the Renderman section of my Material Palette i would see some 3Delight shaders called Shop/Wood (or else under a 3Delight menu) But i can't seem to get this to happen..Any suggestions would be appreciated.

PS… Thanks for your post Jason.

Thanks, as i said i do know how to create a window environment variable, it was just unclear if that was what was meant in the installation manuals or wiki. It gave the impression it was a Houdini variable, not a windows one. Regardless i got it to work just as well, from the technique mentioned by Havana.. (And i will be moving to a new Linux distro soon anyway)

mantra holds it's own against prman just fine…the reason that maya and max added mental ray is because the default renderers in those apps are criminally bad…maya's in particular.

Well i have no doubt that Mantra is capable, it's just me who does not have the time to get the most out of it, however i must say in the 10 seconds I've used 3Delight, I'm already much happier with the speed of rendering.

Regardless the trend is towards external renderer's as choices, 3Delight and Mental Ray, because of their market dominance and feature set. Maya and Max etc, could never keep up with the likes of Lightwave, so they had to buy their way into the rendering, it makes sense because Autodesk and Softimage can concentrate on core tools like Animation and FX, rather than needing to upgrade the renderer at the same time. With advances like MetaMill etc, it's likely that SESI will have a hard time keeping pace with Mental Images and Autodesk at the same time…

Personally I'd love Houdini to have an FPrime clone! Than it would be sweet, sweet for realtime feedback.

Anyway….

Getting back OT…. I have tried installing the shader.otl (from 3Delight/shaders) into the digital asset library. This seems to do something, but i get no updated materials under Renderman or anywhere else…. Is there something else i need to do apart from scanning them?

Where should i be looking for them to show up?