baking textures with Redshift

This youtuber explains how to bake lightmaps... Textures is a very similar process
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5LcTTywUVs

The key points.. I will do a proper write up later.
Tick "bake rendermaps" in your Redshift Rop.
Ensure the object you're baking is specified in both the Rendermap & Objects tabs
The baker will just bake whatever it is given - so for noise/triplanars, you might want to make a new material with just that node pulled in, using a material merge. Or you might want to pull in the whole diffuse colour etc.
For bumps/float values, I use a "Color maker" node as an "out" null.. Nulls don't seem to behave. (could be wrong on this)

oh - and make sure in the IPR tab of the rop, IPR Progressive Rendering is turned OFF.

oh oh - remember to put the objects and/or lights you might want to be baking into the usual objects bit of the ROP!

get the number of vertices per primitive

 

Took ages figuring this out, but an old post from odforce came to the rescue.

switch node or blending transforms at object level

If you need to switch or blend between two (or more) null transforms, eg to parent an object use the BLEND OBJECT. Kinda simple, goes to show how much I work at SOP level ha.

You'll probably want to use the Sequence mode, with "Shortest Path Rotation Blending" ticked, to avoid weird flipping (depending on what and how you're blending stuff)

attaching nulls to parts of a moving/deforming object. rivet.

At SOP level, select 3 points of the geo you need to attach a rivet to, this is to calculate rotation (if your object/mesh-area is rotating/deforming)

Make a group with these points, call it something like "pivot_group".

 Go up to Object Level and make a Rivet node.
Here, specify the SOP eg - /obj/geo1/object_merge1

and the pivot_group in the Point Group dialog box.

You can now parent a NULL or something else to the rivet. Something I noticed, was the rotation of the null can be a bit offset, and I've been manually adjusting the rotation...

If you're exporting a null for Flame, you might be better off parenting a camera object, as the alembic export seems to ignore the null. Maya will import a null, although it will show up as an invisible point, so again you're probably better off using a camera for this too.

I've been exporting the null using the File-Export-Alembic tool..

alternative to attribute interpolation, point specific?

This is quite a simple tip, but I always forget about it..

I had a a bunch of points that, over time, would get stretched out along the z axis. The stretching was dictated by a few random attributes, so it wasn't obvious which would end up the furthest away from the starting point.
Later it turned out I needed to adjust the pscale of each point, based on it's position. ie; the tip would be largest, the tail would be smallest.

So, timeshift and hold your points to the last frame. In a point vop, use a "relative to bounding box" node and get the delta vector. Output it to however it works for you - in my case I used a vector-to-float node to isolate the Z value and I called it pscale_z. Very original eh?

For whatever reason, I wasn't able to get attribute interpolation to work - I thought I could just plug in the moving points and the static end frame into the node, but the arrays and values just weren't working for me.. Leave a comment if you know how to get it working! (it does work for scatters and primitives, as the sourceprim and uv get created for you...)

Anyway, my work around was to use a point wrangle. Plug the moving points into the first input (0), and the static points with the pscale_z attributes into the second input (1).

f@pscale_z=point(1,"pscale_z",@ptnum);

 that's it! The moving points will now take the pscale_z attribute from input "1" . As long as you don't mess around with point numbers, this will keep working. (or if you do need to do that, I guess, give it an @id value somehow)

flickering pyro - especially after converting particles to vdb

 Say you've made some nice particles and you give them density/burn/temperature and then convert these to VDB fields. You might find they flicker ever so slightly during rendertime. This is to do with a changing grid size. The "fix" is to make a gigantic box shaped VDB that encompasses the area of your particles/sim and plug this into the second input of the VDB from Particles node. Now the grid is fixed and you shouldn't have any more related flickering!

Pro tip from Walter.

chris wood & walter naming points based on their names individually...or something

bit of a weird one, but it's meant to be good.