Hello,
I'm kinda new to the HtoA plugin so here comes a beginners question:
We are using Houdini quite heavily and to avoid to export scenes into Maya to be able to render with Arnold, we tried the HtoA plugin.
Arnold shows up in Houdini and we also have enough Arnold licenses. Inside Houdini, everything works fine. If we now try to send the HIP file to the render farm, or even try to render it locally with hbatch, the renderer just gets stuck. Looking at the background processes hbatch has launched, we see the "kick" process which apparently gets his input from Houdini. The weird part is, that the "kick" point to /dev/null as input and aside from having one CPU maxed to 100% utilization, the process never comes back.
Test scenes like a simple sphere which should take seconds won't render as well. Aside from that, even plain Houdini scenes, where we want to use the default mantra renderer won't render due to the Arnold plugin.
Can anyone shed light on the darkness here?
Solved! Go to Solution.
Solved by julian.hodgson. Go to Solution.
kick or hick?
What's the Output Picture set to (in the Arnold ROP) ?
Can you get an Arnold log?
Oh, of course, "kick"
I have to ask the artist but as far as I can see, it's set to type file and points to a path rendering EXR files.
I would be glad if you could point me to the log file, as I can't find anything. And in addition, the output from hbatch is not meaningful, even if it has been set to high and info.
that's an example how it get's split:
echo 'render -V -a -f 79 85 /out/mantra quit' | /opt/hfs16.5.323/bin/hbatch -R -i -q -v render_farm_test.hip
/opt/hfs16.5.323/bin/hbatch-bin -R -i -q -v render_farm_test.hip
/opt/htoa-houdini-16.5.323/htoa-2.2.2_ra19eea7_houdini-16.5.323/scripts/bin/kick -i /dev/null
kick? I'd be really surprised if it was kick. HtoA includes hick and it pipes stuff out of Houdini through hick
You can set the Arnold log options in the Arnold ROP
Please can you upgrade to HtoA 2.2.3. This has been fixed in the latest version
https://support.solidangle.com/display/A5AFHUG/HtoA+2.2.3
Great, that seems to have fixed all our issues, thanks so much!
While it's working now, we are facing the issue that arnold 20180209 isn't supported with out license anymore.
What options do we have to get it running (support expired 12/2017 )?