I’ve been dealing a lot with authoring flipbook textures in Houdini lately, and I wanted to share a quick tidbit on rendering (and reading) image sequences that aren’t very sequential.
Most ROP output nodes in Houdini will allow you to output every nth frame by changing the rendering increment, saving both rendering time and disk space.
ROP with the Increment Parameter highlighted
However, with this comes the issue that if you’re using the default $F
variable in your filenames, you’ll end up with names such as 01, 03,
05, 07, etc. This makes it messy when you try to read these files back
into Houdini for rendering or compositing purposes, or even if you’re
just trying to check things out in mplay. There are of course
expressions to only read back every other frame, as well as external
tools to batch rename files, but I wanted to show you a way to have them
written correctly from the get-go.
Let’s say that you’re rendering out every 2 frames of texture.$F4.tga,
but you want it to output 0001, 0002, 0003.. instead of 0001, 0003,
0005.. We can achieve this by replacing the filename with the following:
texture.`padzero(4, floor($F/2) + 1)`.tga
ROP with the expression in the Output Picture field
Let’s deconstruct this expression:
padzero()is function that adds padding (leading zeroes) to a number, which allows us to emulate the 4 in$F4. The first argument is how many digits to pad with, while the second argument is the number to pad.padzero(2, 5)evaluates to05,padzero(6, 24)evaluates to000024, etc.floor()is a common math function to round a number downwards. Since frame numbers should be integers (whole numbers), we usefloor()to round results such as64.3down to64.$F/2, as you might guess, simply divides the frame number by 2. If you are outputting every third, seventh, etc. frame instead, you should replace 2 with the desired number.
So in practice, what happens when we’re rendering out frame 37 of our simulation is the following:
$F/2will divide 37 by 2, outputting 18.5floor(18.5)will round it down to 1818 + 1is something we need since frame 1 evaluates to 0padzero(4, 19)will pad the number, outputting 0019
Using expression magic, we now have beautiful filenames that behave predictably when used with other programs!
Bonus Lesson: Linking to the Increment Parameter
Let’s say that you find yourself experimenting with different increments, but you don’t want to update the $F/2
part of the expression constantly to match what you’ve entered. On most
ROP output nodes, the increment parameter is referred to as f3, so by instead writing $F/ch('f3') it’ll reference whatever assigned to the Increment parameter. Proceduralism!
The tooltip will show you how to refer to a parameter in expressions