Monthly Archives: May 2014

[Linux] Missing .sog files?

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Sometimes on Linux you may get “unable to load dynamic library” errors for .sog files. Like this:

00:00:00     0MB WARNING |  unable to load dynamic library: /home/stephen/solidangle/mtoa/2014/xgen_procedural.sog: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

or this:

00:00:00     0MB WARNING |  unable to load dynamic library: /usr/apps/houdini/houdini-13.0.343/htoa/arnold_plugins/driver_houdini.sog: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Don’t worry about the “.sog” part. In most cases, Arnold isn’t actually looking for a .sog file. Arnold is trying to load a .so file, and either the .so itself or a dependency is missing. The “.sog” is printed by mistake in the log message (and this is fixed in the next Arnold version).

So (heh) focus your investigation on why Arnold couldn’t load the .so file (try running ldd on it).

In the two examples above:

  • xgen_procedural.so couldn’t be loaded because LD_LIBRARY_PATH didn’t include the Maya lib folder, so all the tbb-related libraries were missing.
  • driver_houdini.so was missing some Houdini dependencies, but in this case it was being loaded into MtoA, so driver_houdini wasn’t needed and the warning could be safely ignored.

What’s a .sog?
If a plugin has a .sog extension, AiLoadPlugins() will load the plugin with RTLD_GLOBAL, which means the symbols from the plugin will be globally exposed and available to other plugins.

.sog is a Maya naming convention for an .so to be dlopen’ed with RLD_GLOBAL

[Tip] Searching the docs

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Here’s a few tips for searching the docs at support.solidangle.com

If you don’t see any useful suggestions when you type in a search, click the “Search for” link. That will take you to the Search page.
search-tips-1

On the Search page, you can narrow down your search to a specific “space”, such as the Maya User Guide or the Softimage Tutorials.

search-tip-1a

If you don’t see the space you want, just start typing “Softimage” or “Maya” or “Arnold” in the search box, and then you’ll see those spaces and you can search just that one specific space.

search-tip-1b
You can also search for specific types of content, such as Pages or Blog Posts. I often click Pages to get rid of all the images (attachments) that show up in the search results.

[Arnold] [MtoA] Disabling Skip License Check

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watermark
If you render a scene that has Skip License Check enabled, you’ll get the Arnold watermark. One way to make sure this doesn’t happen is to turn off Skip License Check from the command line:

render -r arnold -ai:slc off some_scene.mb

kick -set options.skip_license_check off -dp -dw some.ass

You might also want to enable Abort on License Fail (-ai:alf for render, -set options.abort_on_license_fail for kick).