Geom with "copy to points" instanced spheres not showing.

[mz2]

I'm having trouble rendering some geometry in Houdini in OctaneRender that I've constructed by adapting from this tutorial: https://vimeo.com/132679428

I read that OctaneRender cannot render point clouds so in my version of the scene I used a "Copy to points" SOP with the stamp primitive being a sphere mesh, using packed primitives. The geometry is still however not showing in the render at all (it is showing fine in the viewport and in Mantra). What am I doing wrong? I tried adding a 2nd material SOP after the "copy to points" instancing in case it was about that, but doesn't appear to make a difference.

I've shared a session presenting the problem here:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/9oqvhptvdoqj ... 9C0ya?dl=0

(Note that it takes a moment (a few minutes) of baking to initially open the project, as projecting the texture to point colours takes a while.)

[mz2]

For reference, this is what the Mantra rendering of the scene looks like:

Example Mantra rendering of the scene

[juanjgon]

Hi,

The plugin can render particle effects using the Octane native sphere primitive. You have more details about this workflow in the docs:
https://docs.otoy.com/manuals/products/ ... particles/

The plugin doesn't support the Houdini packed primitives yet (it is a planned feature for the near future), and the Copy SOP can't be used for instancing (internally the data is seen like real copies of the object, only Mantra understand it as an instancer) so I suppose that the particle rendering is the best workflow for this kind of effects.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[mz2]

Thanks! And whoa, as expected, OctaneRender is *insanely* fast at rendering that scene.

[mz2]

Actually, I have another related problem: the points that I'm rendering have the Cd attribute set based on the 3D scan's texture. Is it possible to get the vertex color to feed into the sphere primitives' color?

[juanjgon]

Octane doesn't support point attributes yet, but the plugin has a trick to encode color attributes in the particle systems using the sphere UV mapping feature. In the same docs page posted before you have a brief description of how it works.

-Juanjo

[mz2]

Ah, I'd read that but didn't get it to work – I had misunderstood though, what I had tried to do was to tick that color packing into the UV map, and then use the original texture as the texture. Oops, need to instead use the texture that's included in the plugin install. Will give that a go…