Auto RIB
A tool to export heavy scatterings with camera frustum and a Tractor integration to send the workload to the farm.
 Working with maya comes with its pros and cons, thus, for the large scale scattering I had to build a solid workflow capable of handeling million of plants, trees, debris, etc.. Therefore, I choosed to go with houdini and use the RIB format. (You can find the detailled process here) ####WIP link#####
The use of this tool is very straight forward; first you input a camera, then you choose all the set scatterings you want to export for you shot and eventually you choose if you want a classic RIB, a RIB with matte (holdout) or both and if you wish to dispatch the job to the farm or not and you are done, just press the Export button !
In the background, I make use of the houdini python API (hou) to perform the requested operations. (more infos about houdini automation)Â ####WIP link#####
When creating the tool, I stumbled uppon an ennoying issue : trying to export RIBs in houdini standalone thows an error. In fact when you export a RIB with the interface, at the end of the export you are greeted with a popup window displaying the newly written RIB "code". Problem ? In standalone mode this window tries to open itself but it generates an error because the UI libraries aren't loaded.
My workaround was to disable completely the creation of this window in the RenderMan's ROP node (rfh) code.
Freed from this annoying issue the tool was working like a charm and we used it on a daily basis !