Sample Scenes

Useful scenes and assets for learning Solaris and USD.

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Cornell Box
Material Lookdev
Noise Sampler
Veach MIS Planks
USD Assets

Houdini ships with a handful of USD scenes and assets. Some demonstrate best practices for arranging USD scenes or assets. Others are just useful models and scenes for testing different workflows.

Tip

Scenes are intended to be opened as-is, using a Sublayer LOP. Assets should be referenced using nodes like Reference, Asset Reference or Stage Manager.

These are mostly complete scenes. Their canonical camera is at /World/Camera. Some scenes are also available in the Tab menu, or recipes on the Sublayer LOP.

Cornell Box ¶

$HH/usd/scenes/cornell_box/cornell_box.usd

The classic Cornell Box rendering scene. Adapted from Pablo Delgado’s CC0 version.

Includes a variant set called contents, with a variant which replaces the boxes with spheres.

Material Lookdev ¶

$HH/usd/scenes/material_lookdev/material_lookdev.usd

A material look-development test scene. Provides a consistent scene for comparing materials and renders.

The variant set LookDevScene on /World` can change the scene into the Standard Shader Ball, provided by the ASWF USD Assets Working Group (CC BY 4.0).

The scene is under /World and the camera is at /World/Camera, but otherwise the scene is unchanged. See the link above for details on the features the scene provides.

Noise Sampler ¶

$HH/usd/scenes/noise_sampler/noise_sampler.usd

Demonstrates various sources of noise in renders. Originally created for the Karma User Guide

Veach MIS Planks ¶

$HH/usd/scenes/veach_mis_planks/veach_mis_planks.usd

Inspired by Eric Veach’s PhD thesis. Demonstrates glossy surface rendering improvements with Multiple Importance Sampling.

USD Assets ¶

Some of these are available from the Tab menu in LOPs or the Asset Catalog.

Barrel	`$HH/usd/assets/barrel/barrel.usd`
Crag	`$HH/usd/assets/crag/crag.usd`
Rubber Toy	`$HH/usd/assets/rubbertoy/rubbertoy.usd`
Shaderball	`$HH/usd/assets/shaderball/shaderball.usd`
Simple Primitive	`$HH/usd/assets/simpleprimitive/simpleprimitive.usd`
Squab	`$HH/usd/assets/squab/squab.usd`
Template Body	`$HH/usd/assets/templatebody/templatebody.usd`
Template Head	`$HH/usd/assets/templatehead/templatehead.usd`
Tommy	`$HH/usd/assets/tommy/tommy.usd`
Wine Barrel	`$HH/usd/assets/wineBarrel/wineBarrel.usd`

Solaris and Karma

Solaris and USD ¶

USD basics

Introduces a number of USD concepts, and how they relate to Houdini’s USD support.
How LOPs work

How Solaris LOP (lighting operator) nodes work to generate/modify USD.
Solaris user interface

Guide to using the user interface to interact with LOP networks and USD data.
Primitive matching patterns

How to use the USD primitive matching syntax.
LOPS and USD glossary

Do you speak USD?
Solaris scene viewer

Describes the differences/enhancements in the Solaris viewer compared to the Houdini object/SOP viewer.
Using VEX with USD

Customize Solaris and USD with scripting.
Writing out USD

Save USD data to disk.
SOP Geometry I/O

Details of how Houdini converts SOP geometry to USD, and how you can control the process.
Component Builder

The Component Builder tool puts down a network snippet for creating a USD model from SOPs, with support for materials, variants, payloads, and layering.
Performance tips

Improving interactive workflows in Solaris.
Example scenes

Useful scenes and assets for learning Solaris and USD.

Karma ¶

Karma

Houdini’s Physically Based USD Renderer.
Karma XPU

Houdini’s fast and modern XPU render engine.
Color management

Learn more about OCIO, color spaces, gamma and tone mapping.
Render statistics

How to view various statistics about the render process of an on-going render or rendered image.

Karma User Guide ¶

Karma User Guide

An in-depth guide to Houdini’s modern render engine.

Look Development ¶

MaterialX

Houdini has VOP node equivalents of the MaterialX shader nodes. You can build a shader network using these nodes, or import an existing MaterialX-based shader, and use them with Karma (Houdini’s USD renderer).
UDIM paths

You can encode different tiles of a texture space into different texture files, each with its own resolution. You can then specify a texture filename such as kaiju.exr, and Houdini will replace the token with the specific tile address at load time.
Shader translation

Describes the Solaris shading framework, including shader node translation to USD primitives.
Shotbuilder tools

Multi-Shot Pipeline in a Box.

Procedurals ¶

Ocean procedural

Create oceans with foam from low-resolution input geometry at render time
Rigid bodies procedural

Create deformed geometry at render time.
Crowds procedural

Optimize crowd scenes at render time.

Supporting documents ¶

Karma XPU pre-compiling

Reduce Karma XPU’s time to the first pixel.
Inside husk
Light Path Expressions

Extract the contribution of light sources to a scene.
AOVs

Workflows for render vars.
Cryptomatte

How to generate image maps associating each pixel in the image with the object name and/or material in the original source scene.
Karma image and pixel filters
The Image Filter LOP

Spice up your renders with filters.
Karma light filters

You can attach a light filter to a light to modify the light’s output in different ways.
Karma lens shader
Karma Texture Baker

Transfer geometry, shader, and lighting information to texture maps.
Karma Ray Switch

Use ray types to identify and analyze objects.
Karma Room Map shader

Projects interior maps onto windows for the impression of 3-dimensional rooms
Subsurface scattering

Render translucent materials like wax, juice, or plastic.
Light instancing

Create thousands of lights with scattering.
Portal lights

Optimize dome lights and physical skies with portals.
Geometry lights

Turn any geometry into a light source.
Textures from attributes

Use texture paths from attributes in material networks.
Scatter instances

Create instances at render time through Hydra.
Point instancing

Create, edit, and manipulate instancing points.
Live rendering for the Render Gallery

Get real time rendering updates in the Render Gallery.
Stencil maps

Fast opacity rendering without Karma’s shader engine.
Scene Graph Tree expansion states

Control the visibility of primitives by expanding the Scene Graph Tree.
USD SOP tools

Create USD-compliant geometry in SOP contexts.