AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Unable to identity Houdini renderer used (using event plugin)

Hey,

In a softimage event you could do this:

renderer = self.GetPluginInfoEntryWithDefault( "Renderer", "" )

(to figure out if the renderer was arnold, mental ray, redshift etc)

Unfortunately, this variable isn’t exposed in the Houdini plugin.

All I have access to is the name of the “OutputDriver”…

People rename these OutputDrivers (nodes) from /out/mantra1 or /out/redshift, to /out/this or /out/that (they give them their own custom names) because of this, I am unable to determine which renderer a Houdini job is using.

This is something I need to know for my Event Plugin…

Does anyone have any ideas how I can get this information?

please and thank you :slight_smile:

Hey Shaun,

The biggest issue I see here with what you’re attempting, and it’s why that variable doesn’t exist in our Houdini plugin file, is that each output driver can rendered differently. On the plugin side, we only need to pass in what node needs rendering, not what type it is. You could theoretically have a scene with a mantra node, redshift node, octane node, renderman node, etc. and if you choose to render all /out/ nodes in that Job then that ‘Renderer’ variable doesn’t make sense.

Now chances are that’s not the most reasonable use-case. If you currently want that information (without requiring artists to include the renderer in the name for parsing), you’d have to modify the current submitter to add the associated node type for each node you wish to render to the job. One way you can do this is by using the ‘ExtraInfoKeyValue’ property.

# In SubmitRenderJob in SubmitHoudiniToDeadlineFunctions.py
extraKVPIndex = 0
...
ExtraInfoKeyValue%s=%s=%s" % ( extraKVPIndex, node, node.type().description() ) )
extraKVPIndex += 1
...

Or something like that. Then you should be able to access that key-value pair in your event plugin by using the output driver to access it’s type.

Should be enough to get you started. I could see this being useful for us to add to Houdini in general (maybe not this exact implementation), but let me know how this goes for you.

Cheers

Oh perfect. Thank you Mepp, that’s very helpful - I can totally handle doing that :slight_smile:

Cheers,
Shaun.

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