broken EXR light passes ? Tweet

[deepsea1001]

hi there,
I am running into a problem writing out mulitcannel EXRs with lighting passes.
I am pretty sure I have everything setup correctly with the light ID (1-3) on the lights themsevles. The light passes show up and look correct in IPR (the right-click>View Pass):

But when they are saved to disk as multicannel EXR and loaded in, they are broken - just a couple randomly colored vertical stripes going through the channel. I am reading the EXRs back in via COPs and this is what on of the light passes looks like (attached):

Beauty, Alpha, and Z-depth channels look fine.

I just paid for and installed OctaneVR today, so it is the latest build. Running on Windows 10, Houdini 16.0.633.

Any help would be great.
Thanks.

[juanjgon]

Hi,

Thanks for reporting this issue. I'll check it. Do you know if saving the passes to individual EXR files has the same problem?

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[deepsea1001]

Not sure how to save light passes to individual files.

I have three light passes enabled, and Output Image Files check in the Octane ROP. I tried setting the file format to "EXR untonemapped" and also "PNG tonemapped" (instead of multilayer EXR) and strangely, it renders one image per frame but that image is the 3rd lightpass, not the beauty.

Not sure what is going on.

[juanjgon]

It is really a weird issue. I can reproduce this problem here, but the multilayered EXR file seems broken only for the Houdini COPs. The same file works fine for example in Fusion, without problems with the light passes. Are you going to work with Houdini also for compositing, or are you going to use Fusion, AE or Nuke?

If you write the passes to individual files, all seems to work fine. The light passes can be read by the Houdini COPs without problems. Be aware that to write the individual passes files, you must use the $OCTANE_PASS variable in the filename to add the pass string to the file and don't overwrite all the passes using the same filename.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[cgbulldozer]

Hi

Similar problem with other passes when using MultyLayerEXR:
- PostProcessing
- Diffuse
- GeometryNormal
.. and other

Strange, but the Z-channel is displayed well.

It is clear that I can use the workaround, and render them separately.
But MultyEXR - standard pipeline and it should be supported.

Version - 3.06.4.0
Houdini 16.0.633



Thank you!

[juanjgon]

Hi,

In what package do you have these problems with the exr files, only importing the files inside Houdini, or also in another comp program?

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[deepsea1001]

Bumping this thread two years later. This still seems to be broken in Octane 2019 and Houdini 18.

Lightpasses (and some of the info channels) rendered out of Octane into a mulitlayer EXR are black in Houdini COPS. They load fine in other compositing app.
I am using COPS for a lot of proceedural compositing (with TOPs) and really need to be able to get at the light passes.

Should I post this as a bug to the SideFX forums or do you think it comes from the Octane side?

sorry to trouble you again about this, but it's a showstopper in our current pipeline.

thx.

[juanjgon]

Hi,

If the problem is that Houdini can't load the Octane EXR files into COP nodes, while at the same time these same files work fine in other packages, this problem sounds to me like a limitation on the Houdini side, so perhaps you should report this issue to SideFX including some example files with this problem.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[deepsea1001]

hi Juanjo
I've just been in touch with SideFx and the problem in COPS seems to be related to the spaces in the channel filenames, i.e. "Light Pass 1". It is not handling the import correctly because of this. This explains why 'Z-depth' works, but 'Shading Normal' or "Light Pass 1" doesn't. They've filed a bug report.

In the meantime, as a workaround is there anyway to rename the channels that get written into the EXR from the Octane side?

[juanjgon]

Yes, I think that it is possible to rename the layer names to remove the spaces or replace them for another character. I'll try to add this feature to the next build.

Thanks,
-Juanjo