To be able to fully use your Renderman shader you must convert it to an .otl file. To do this you will be using the rmands.exe function in Houdini. However, before you do this you must establish the pathways in Houdini so that rmands can access all the files it needs. To do this run the the houdini.bat which you made in the previous section. Once you have run this, go into the command prompt and use the rmands function to convert your shaders. If you have the Houdini bin directory pathway in your environmental variables, you can do this by typing in the following command: rmands -L FileAddress/FileName.otl FileAddress/FileName.slo. If your system does not have Houdini added to its pathways you will need to cd into houdini's bin directory before using the rmands. Refer to the example below:

There is no limit to the number of .slo file which can be loaded into an .otl file. You could load your entire custom shader library into a single .otl file. To load additional shaders into your .otl file, follow the same steps you used to create the original .otl file, and use the same file name as the original. In addition to the -L flag which is absolutely manditory to make rmands create the .otl file, there are several other useful flags which can be used to tweek the shader's interface once it is loaded into Houdini.

-i

Run using soinfo (for RenderDotC).

-e

Run using sletell (for Entropy).

-p

Run using sloinfo (for prman).

-b

Create a backup of the operator type library file.

-g

Specify maximum size per parameter page. The shader parameters will be split into multiple pages if there are too many parameters in the shader. This flag must be followed by the chosen number of maximum parameters per tab.

 

To use your .otl file, go start up Houdini, click on file and select install operator type library. Navigate to your .otl file and hit the install button. Now you can access all of your loaded shaders in shops.