meant to attach this image but here's a hip file simplified, you can clearly see the faceting artifacts on the characters hands. if you play with the displacement/normals/SSS radius youc can see it more or less clearly all over the model.




https://drive.google.com/file/d/1o0XC73JQehmChjwEQCaLY-fJXaCcp_5F/view?usp=sharing [drive.google.com]

I'm noticing that I get some weird faceting when i use the SSS + detailed displacement, or normal maps sometimes.

as an example here's voronoi noise used to drive displacement. I see this faceting with either normals or displacement.

no idea how to get rid of this with karma, it seems to be an issue with both cpu and xpu. have tried all sorts of combinations of things. am i missing something or does this need a fix? its more clearly visible when the SSS scale is lower.

im confused, i dont think i understand what the houdini specific env var / packages have to do with the windows system level env variables? theres nothing in my windows system enviornment variables under path that seem to pertain to houdini in any way that I can tell, i didnt think these two things were related...

if using packages, how would that work?

yep, that did it. latest redshift is breaking karma somehow...

im also having this issue, im wondering if updating to the latest build of redshift caused it? trying without the redshift package to see if it makes a difference.

Unfortunately this doesn't seem to be the case. I also cant tell-- when I set this off not using deadline, its seemingly random whether it picks up rendering the frames or not? i just can't tell what the reason is, its not sensitive enough or something. or Im doing something wrong. but it seems like this should be pretty straightforward.

still struggling with this. im using deadline + tops with a USD Render top now. It seems like in tops theres sort of a way to skip frames that isnt the most reliable, but this doesnt matter with deadline because it doesnt carry over at all. any idea what the best way is to get missing frames patched easily here?

Is there any way to give an option to have solaris / husk / whatever skip rendered frames? Seems like this is present in all the houdini plugins but sadly missing from solaris, i'm using redshift for this specific project but would love to have the option regardless of engine.

Ive found the dumb easy way of doing this (or a few ways actually.)

one way: basically do the switcher to switch between cameras, and then after the switcher set a render settings lop that is set to pick your camera. in here you can set it to just pick "/cameras/*" as your render camera. this way it will just grab whatever camera is made available by the switcher. note however that this only really works if it is only able to pick one possible camera, so if you have more cameras up the chain it may not work.

another way: don't use a switcher and instead use a render settings node, and then just keyframe the selected camera. you can keyframe it to swtich from "/cameras/SHOTCAM_001" to "/cameras/SHOTCAM_002" for example.


i would also note that if you do this camera switcher setup and you plug the switcher into your scene as a sublayer without anything plugged into those cameras it will be slow. however if you plug all of the cameras into the rest of the scene above it, for some reason this is much faster. alternatively if you just use the second method i described without the switcher, that is also super fast.

Nice thanks! Yeah am semi aware of some of these performance things, like ther merge being kind of slow or wiring things the wrong way. The switch is nice because i can just simply tick the next thing when im ready to switch cameras. What i was doing was at the end of my chain sublayering in the rendersettings with /cameras/* and the switch.

You are right that just keyframing the cameras on already merged in cams on the rendersettings lop works too, i wouldn't have thought to keyframe that!

Sounds like a good move here might just be to do the switching at the end of the chain. Just a little annoying that the rest of the scene has to be linked in with the rest of the cameras.

I'm still on 19.0.622 so maybe this has been addressed, but the switch lop is very slow for what it's doing. I'm just using it to switch cameras, basically I have a bunch of cameras plugged into a switch and am using a rendersettings lop after to set the camera to so that just grabs whatever camera the switch is set to. this helps me a lot on a big project im doing where i am trying to quickly audition cameras/edits in a large scene with lots of mocap performances.

i have all the characters cached out to usd, the enviornment, and the props. and it plays back realtime when cached. but then when im using the switch node its incredible slow. it would be great to not have to cache the switch node since im changing things so frequently. just curious if there's something i may be doing wrong or if the switch node just really eats performance, and if so why that may be?

mestela
Shouldn't all these envvars be exposed as parms on the karma lop?

I could imagine wanting to set this per project or even per shot. It'll get frustrating if we have to keep jumping out to shells or the windows envvar editor to alter these xpu specific settings.

big +1 to this. hopefully these things will largely be exposed once we're out of beta?

that was INCREDIBLE, i'm unbelievably psyched to see what is done over the next year with kinefx, definitely planning some experiments with it already. amazing job SideFX, always ahead of the curve!

id bet youll hear something at siggraph but im not in the beta so i know nothing concrete

this looks reallllllllllly great, would love to try this out!

woohoo! That was nuts. Thanks sidefx and everyone who participated It's been a blast to be a part of this. I explored a lot of stuff in houdini i hadnt touched much before including rigging, animation, lots of character modeling, cops, mops, octane, and more. I think after this challenge I'm finally ready to cut the other DCCs out of my personal workflow and just use houdini for all things 3d!

Here's the link to my final entry that I just posted the animated version of. https://vimeo.com/443864098/f8f856dc67 [vimeo.com]

Cheers

AHHHH

edit:

here's the animated finished version.



Happy end of first Houly! It's been a blast, thanks sidefx and everyone who participated

De moisturizer!!!!!

really blew this ones, i guess i tired to make a silky dog, damnit. at least we got 2 more days!