Hey, I am rendering with redshift and trying to transfer my pipeline to Solaris.

I got a few questions about Solaris

1. Is there a way to render only a region of the screen? this feature is available in redshift and mantra.

2. I'm trying to render a goat with a groom, I imported the groom via the "SOP import" node and applied an RS fur material, but the material doesn't seem to be applied in practice.

3. Can USD data even save the "width" of a curve/groom?

Other than that I am experiencing a lot of crashes especially when attempting to work in different contexts.

What do you think, is it worth it to switch to Solaris?

thanks for reading!

I'll try to answer your questions the best I can.

Render region is an often requested feature that I think is on the possible todo list. For now crop windows can be used to limit the rendering to a section of the image.

I can't speak for redshift as I've never used it, but in my testing of rendering grooms with karma, the materials are being applied as expected.

The usd schema for basis curves includes the 'widths' attribute which sopimport should translate for you from width or pscale.

There is a render region option that used to work pretty well in Image View, but it got really buggy a while back. I believe a bug was filed but I'm not sure about the status.

jsmack
For now crop windows can be used to limit the rendering to a section of the image.

Are you referring to cropping with the red handles on the camera? If so, they have no function in Redshift.

As Tim mentioned, the Image view render region is too buggy to be used currently. Only okey workaround I can think of is to open a preview window (right click on node), zoom to you region. If the settings on the renderer is set to viewport size, then you can have a very small window showing you the region and rendering that alone.

As far as the hair shader in Redshift we use it all the time with solaris with no issues.

Crashing happens when you start using Solaris cause you do weird things. Suddenly it stops crashing. Can explain why. It’s some kind of black magic.

Thanks everyone for the comments

It seems to me that the "profit" of moving to Solaris doesn't justify the effort, it's still lacking some features and requires a high technical knowledge

What profits have you guys gained from using Solaris? do you use it as a core lookdev tool?

What profits have you guys gained from using Solaris? do you use it as a core lookdev tool?

Understandable. It can be tricky to get in to. We have moved all of out light and lookdev into it, allowing us to work faster. But we also have 10 custom HDAs for things like aovs, custom aov, rendersettings, rops, contexts, publish and similar.

AndreasWeidman
Crashing happens when you start using Solaris cause you do weird things. Suddenly it stops crashing. Can explain why. It’s some kind of black magic.

Our lighting team gets crashes for all kinds of things, even silly innocuous things you wouldn't suspect, but they're all hard to reproduce at will. And the things that we think may be triggering the crashes are perfectly legit operations or actions that are supported by the software. It's just super hard for us to file bugs for these.