How to render particles?

[Janmansilver]

How do you use the instance object to render particles? Can't get it to work? Do you have a demo file I can have a look at? Can particles retain their individual colors?

[juanjgon]

Yes, you can use the instance node to render Houdini particles instancing any kind of objects using the particle data. The particles can be random shaded using the Octane random texture node, or you instance groups of objects with an individual material in each one to have several materials in the instances, but currently you can't assign an individual color to each instance from a Houdini attribute.

http://render.otoy.com/manuals/Houdini/?page_id=948

I will post some sample scenes about particle rendering using instancing later today.

-Juanjo

[juanjgon]

Attached you have several sample scenes from my plugin test suite using instancing and/or particles. If you have any question, please let me know.

-Juanjo

[Janmansilver]

Thanks the files were really helpfull. In your example the colours seem to follow over from the particles? Is this possible with spline/fur rendering too?

EDIT: Ahh I se the colours er generated by the random node colour node of Octane. So there are no tricks, before open shader language implementation?

[juanjgon]

Sorry, currently the Octane hair only can have a constant color along the strand. Perhaps this limitation could be fixed along the 3.x dev cycle once we can write custom shaders using OSL.

BTW, the next plugin build will add the support of the new native Octane sphere primitive, that should make possible render large amount of particles without use instancing

-Juanjo