Renderman User Attributes on point instances

[aleung]

Probably a simple question, but how would I go about creating a renderman user attribute on a point instanced piece of geometry ?

When you create point instanced geometry, each entry for that instance has various attributes attached, such as displacementbound and trace visibility, I want to add my own user attribute to each object that references a houdini point attribute - In maya you could do it easily enough with a rib box containing;

Attribute "user" "string blah" [mattr blahblah]

... but I don't know how to do this in Houdini, anyone got any bright ideas ?

Thanks.

[bigbrando]

Hi there,

In the Object parameters, in the Render tab, there are fields called "PreInclude" and "PostInclude". You can enter a filename into these field of a file which includes your rib snippet to wish to insert into the ribstream.

For example; your could put "user_attib.rib" in there and in the user_attrib.rib, put your "Attribute 'user' 'string', etc" stuff.

[aleung]

Yep, thanks, got that, but I need to perform variable substitution in the included RIB, I would guess that houdini won't do this on those script files ?

I need to insert one of my point attributes as the argument to a prman user attribute for each instance.