Some Issues and Workarounds I Encountered with Solaris in a Recent Project

This was my first time using Solaris and Karma XPU in a project. I ran into several issues and wanted to share my experience and some temporary solutions. Hopefully the SideFX team can take a look.

01. Lighting

When you create a light and switch to specular or diffuse placement mode, holding Ctrl + Left Mouse Button and dragging not only changes the distance but also unexpectedly alters the light intensity. This seems to be a bug.

Workaround: Switch back to Edit mode before adjusting the light using shortcut keys. This avoids the issue.

02. Incorrect Render Frame Range

If you have multiple USD Render ROPs in your scene, whether you're using Deadline/farm rendering or Houdini's built-in TOPs to render in batches, you may encounter incorrect frame range rendering. It seems to always use the timeline’s current maximum frame range.

For example, if your global timeline is 0–100, but another shot needs to render up to frame 200, it will get clipped.

Workaround: Activate the shot with the largest frame range before rendering. That seems to fix it.

03. Layout Asset Gallery Not Updating

If you save your assets into a DB file and open two instances of Houdini: updating the asset DB in one instance and saving it won’t update it in the other. Even reopening the DB file doesn't work.

Workaround: First open a different DB file, then re-open your current one. That will refresh the gallery.
A manual Refresh button would be really helpful here.

Another major issue: all asset paths in the Asset Gallery are saved as absolute paths. This means if you move to a new project with a different directory structure, the assets break.

04. Stage Manager

If you try to copy multiple items in Stage Manager, Houdini crashes immediately.
This is a confirmed bug, and I've reported it — no solution yet.

Another major limitation of Stage Manager: there’s no easy way to replace assets. A simple "Replace with..." function is badly needed.

When I select Labs > Reset View, Houdini throws a bunch of Python errors. After this happens, the Stage Manager becomes completely unusable — the only fix is to restart Houdini.

This seems like another serious bug.

05. Denoising

Right now Karma requires denoising to produce clean images. However, both denoise options struggle with temporal denoising — making animated sequences prone to flickering.

Unresolved issue: I haven’t found a good solution to this yet.

06. Instancing and Cryptomatte

If your scene includes instanced geometry — for example, using a duplicate node with Make Instanceable enabled — Cryptomatte will behave incorrectly. The colors assigned to instances will flicker constantly across frames.

Workaround: Avoid using instancing for now if you need stable Cryptomatte output.
This is clearly a bug and needs to be addressed.

The first one is not a bug, it's intended to maintain the effective intensity of the light as you adjust its distance. I quite like this feature because it allows me to adjust the look of the light's edge falloff without worrying about its intensity.

There's a "Keep Brightness" option in the scene viewer toolbar that will override this.

eikonoklastes
The first one is not a bug, it's intended to maintain the effective intensity of the light as you adjust its distance. I quite like this feature because it allows me to adjust the look of the light's edge falloff without worrying about its intensity.

There's a "Keep Brightness" option in the scene viewer toolbar that will override this.

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Thanks!

wanglifu
This is clearly a bug and needs to be addressed.

Have you reported it here: https://www.sidefx.com/bugs/submit/ [www.sidefx.com]
It won't get addressed if you don't.

Have you turned on albedo and normal AOV for the denoiser? We are using oidin with good result.

Heileif
Have you turned on albedo and normal AOV for the denoiser? We are using oidin with good result.

Thanks,do i need output the Albedo and N aov or just check "use Albedo/N" option?