How to do command line rendering in USD-HtoA?

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kohei hidaka asked · Nov 23, 2020 at 11:25 AM

How to do command line rendering in USD-HtoA?

Who knows how to render USD in HtoA on the command line?

When I use htoa's kick command I get the following message.

Is the HTOA kick command still not available for USD?

[myname@mypc ~]$ kick -i /home/myname/test/usd/test.0001.usd -o /home/myname/test/arnold_husk/test.0001.exr

00:00:00 74MB | log started Mon Nov 23 16:21:59 2020

00:00:00 74MB | Arnold 6.1.0.0 [250260fb] linux clang-10.0.1 oiio-2.2.1 osl-1.11.6 vdb-4.0.0 clm-1.1.1.118 rlm-12.4.2 optix-6.6.0 2020/10/27 10: 47:45

00:00:00 74MB | running on mypc, pid=119769

...

00:00:00 75MB | [kick] command: kick -i /home/myname/test/usd/test.0001.usd -o /home/myname/test/arnold_husk/test.0001.exr

00:00:00 75MB | loading plugins from . ....

00:00:00 75MB | no plugins loaded

00:00:00 75MB ERROR | [scene] can't open scene file '/home/myname/test/usd/test.0001.usd', unknown format

00:00:00 75MB | releasing resources

00:00:00 75MB | Arnold shutdown

The usd file was exported using usd_rop, and we're making sure it's properly exported from Houdini's usdview.

I was able to render it using node.render() in the python module, but I don't want to do this because of the hbatch license.

Thank you.

htoa arnold houdini usd

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Answer 1 · 2020-11-23T15:52:17Z

Stephen Blair answered · Nov 23, 2020 at 03:52 PM

kick is kick. The same kick is installed with all Arnold plugins.

I did kick several usd files exported from Houdini.

And the USD kitchen set.

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kohei hidaka · Nov 23, 2020 at 05:13 PM

Kick is a kick; I think so too...

I tried the command on the same USD file with MTOA 4.1.0 and HtoA 5.5.0.1 kicks, respectively, and found that MTOA's kick did not give an error that the format was unknown, the exr file was created and the render view was displayed.

However, we are going to continue to investigate as we are not getting the same results as the USD rendered images in HtoA.

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Stephen Blair ♦♦ kohei hidaka · Nov 23, 2020 at 06:12 PM

@kohei hidaka
You need to add the -l flag to load the usd plugin

C:\Users\blairs>C:\solidangle\htoa-5.5.0.1_r45f2926_houdini-18.5.351\htoa-5.5.0.1_r45f2926_houdini-18.5.351\scripts\bin\kick.exe 
-v 5 
-default_nodes all -dp 
-i C:\Users\blairs\Documents\HoudiniProjects\support\geo\test.1001.usd 
-l C:\solidangle\htoa\htoa-5.4.0_r1db094a_houdini-18.0.566\htoa-5.4.0_r1db094a_houdini-18.0.566\arnold\plugins

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kohei hidaka Stephen Blair ♦♦ · Nov 24, 2020 at 07:55 AM

It seems that the -l option was needed.

I was able to render successfully.

Thank you very much!

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Answer 2 · 2020-11-23T11:33:47Z

Stephen Blair answered · Nov 23, 2020 at 11:33 AM

kick can render USD files. I've tried with several different USD files, binary and ascii.

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kohei hidaka · Nov 23, 2020 at 02:45 PM

Thanks for the answer. Indeed I have seen a successful example with the kick installed in MAYA.

Have you ever tried with htoa?

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