Nightly builds testing

[david.anastacio]

Hi,

Nightly builds are a great way to get the latest updates, specially when VFH still has quite a bit of bugs and productions builds are so far and few. Unfortunately it seems that most times we try to update VFH we run into issues with something else not working.

I'm not going to ask that you go and test every little option and checkbox by hand to make sure everything works, but maybe do control renders and compare. Make a set of renders with most things people use, every type of lights, some shaders, displacement, a volume, motion blur, etc. Re-render that again with every new release and do a "diference" (difference merge in nuke for example) and if the result is not black you have a render difference and most likely an issue, and it could easily be automated. This would save your customers a lot of pain and hours searching why something is not rendering the way it should.

Best,
David.

[ronald_a]

I second that. I'm really all in for those fast fixes/updates the nightlies bring and we have benefited heavily from it. But it is really frustrating to get a new nightly that fixes one thing but breaks another one that used to work before (especially when you don't find out right away and are stuck with the new version at some point).

We have reduced our updates to an absolute minimum because of this (usually just updating for a newer houdini production builds).

Not sure what can be done about this (David's suggestion seems like only a piece of the solution). I just wanted to make sure you are aware.

[Dubbie99]

Yeah regressions seem to be much more frequent in Houdini nightlies than they did in Max. Not sure why that would be.

[docaml]

I just wanted to write something like this when I saw this thread. I stopped using Vray, even so called production builds because of too many bugs. Version 4 was fine and solid (I do not know how it is now), but with version 5, working with Vray became pain. Sorry for harsh words, but it is like it is. Please do something.