H21 introduced a lot of very practical updates to Solaris, which is fantastic to see. However, the layout-related tools still feel quite underdeveloped compared to the rest of the ecosystem.

Stage Manager is a step in the right direction, but it currently has some issues that make it difficult to rely on in production. For example:

Copying multiple selected objects in the list sometimes fails or even causes a crash.

Using Labs → Reset Viewport can trigger a series of error popups.

There’s no option to replace assets directly.

The Layout tool itself also seems to have regressed in H21, with more bugs appearing. The overall concept of this tool is excellent and clearly valuable, but after several years it still hasn’t reached a production-ready state. This feels unusual in the Houdini ecosystem, where tools typically mature into very solid solutions.

Given how much feedback and how many suggestions have already been shared by the community, I’m curious if there are plans for a more significant update to these layout tools in the near future. They have a lot of potential, and many of us would love to see them become stable, dependable parts of the pipeline.

I stick with the reference, transform, and duplicate nodes. I haven't bothered trying the stage manager. It seems counter to proceduralism.

I love proceduralism, but I think it’s very important that a node like the Stage Manager is actually usable. In a real production, and when using USD, the director, PDs, etc. will always want a layout and set dressing that follow an artistic distribution with a manual base. Of course, always supported by a workflow that is as non-destructive as possible. For example, making a large part of the set dressing procedural starting from that layout or key elements placed manually in a compositional way with the Stage Manager.

With H 20.5 I reported a bug that is still unresolved to this day. And it’s a problem that breaks any kind of USD workflow in real production, unless you either do the dressing in SOPs, or the company develops its own usable Stage Manager.

The bug is that once you use a Stage Manager, you can’t use another one afterwards, either to duplicate another element or to edit the position or transformations of those elements. The second Stage Manager simply goes crazy with pivots and transforms. This is more serious than it seems because it breaks a real USD workflow. For example, in the layout stage we place some elements, duplicate them, etc., and then write a layout sublayer. Afterwards, the set dressing department would take that sublayer and should be able to edit it, add the dressing blocking from layout, but when adding another Stage Manager, the bug appears. When editing positions with a new Stage Manager, even if a previous sublayer has been written, the pivots and transforms go haywire.

This makes it impossible to compose shots in Solaris, which is vital for building sequences or real workflows in a pipeline. This week, with more time, I’ll create a new post with a hip file and report the bug again. Many of us are fighting to get the companies we work for to adopt Houdini and Solaris USD in their pipelines, because they’re incredible, but this bug makes it impossible to work in a pipeline—at least for layout and set dressing.
Cheers

Year after year, the same question remains: when will we finally see a layout toolset that’s truly production-ready?