… not the George Clooney movie or the original… although I liked them both…

I've only seen it mentioned twice as a footnote mixed in with feature announcements! What is Project Solaris? An update to Mantra, replacement, a new engine in addition? I think I read somewhere about it supporting USD- so maybe it's something to support quickly going between other engines that support USD?

Anyone know anything about it? And if it is a new engine or update is there a need for beta testers?

Well solaris is a OS from sun microsystems but you want to know about the secret project solaris….

What i know: in H17 there are a LOP and TOP libs and a lot of USD files. More i don't know….

The first rule of Solaris is - you do not talk about Solaris.

I was just going to say this feels like a fight club kinda thing.

Whatever it is I just hope it doesn't affect our unlimited render tokens! That was a huge selling point in talking my management into buying a seat of FX.

The3DStig
Whatever it is I just hope it doesn't affect our unlimited render tokens! That was a huge selling point in talking my management into buying a seat of FX.

i don't think that they will change that! it's a good sales plus and they would get customer complains when that will happen.

Agreed! SideFX seems to listen to their customers.

Some mention of TOPs in the Documentation:
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/topnet.html [www.sidefx.com]

and PDG mentioned here:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/hom/hou/TopNode.html [www.sidefx.com]

Aside from this, it is my favourite OS running on my machines here.

8 Years logged in on A CDE session…. Still running, HW @20+Year !! (But a “tempest” system)

PDG/tops looks to be based on 1987 paper ‘The Program Dependence Graph and Its Use in Optimization’
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS395T/2009fa/papers/ferrante87.pdf [www.cs.utexas.edu]

it permits incremental optimization as the data flow information is updated. Work by others in the area of code motion, vectorization, program understanding, and software engineering can be unified by being expressed in terms of the PDG.

So Tops should be a new context with efficient data processing.

Lops: playing around with the shipped USD apps and looking at what Max Liana is up to with RendermanXPU, I surmise that we are looking at a Hydra viewport with GPU/CPU rendering using XPU in H17.5. This then fulfills the 17 launch ‘GPU-everywhere’ workflow but it doesn't make Mantra GPU based. Bets anyone?

https://vimeo.com/289546856 [vimeo.com]

Edit:
It seems somebody removed this stuff in the meantime… However originally I found these in Houdini's help directory, so these are still available locally, just hidden in the help menu/search. While these are in the released version, even in the daily builds, I thought it is not confidential.
Staff: If it's confidential for the customers too, please remove this post or tell me to do so.

Hey, a little groundschool before takeoff

Understanding task nodes [www.sidefx.com]
Simple TOP network example [www.sidefx.com]

The magic word is Task graph…

So Tops are Task by going whats in the documents.

I guess big FX company's have ask for this, i would think big FX company's have some programmers which all ready do this to a point in some form of python or c++ or vex with in side of Houdini.

I think it will be very us full so eg would be “i am guessing” people could set up a “TASK” to render then set task to colour correct then set another task a separate render then set a task to comp it together then “run the Task” send of to local render or to render farm.

i think vops in side of cops2/img will need to be update in some form they tad slow and old but in future i see the huge possibles with TASK's would stop round trip to NUKE for comp if you do this all in same program

It would be very cool to have ofx plugins with in cop2/img

gfxfx please make a rfe for the ofx and comp update.

this will be cool. Katana is getting a node graph that floats over the viewport… so Houdini will have to compete and finally get one too. Nothing like competition to spur much-requested development, and, it'll be very useful on small screens!

wonder if I'll be able to do my taxes in Houdini18…

cpb
wonder if I'll be able to do my taxes in Houdini18…

For the US:
pip install taxcalc

Mantra is most likely getting Intel Embree enhancements. There are Intel Embree libraries shipping with 17 already that weren't in 16.5

xilofoton
Edit:
It seems somebody removed this stuff in the meantime… However originally I found these in Houdini's help directory, so these are still available locally, just hidden in the help menu/search. While these are in the released version, even in the daily builds, I thought it is not confidential.
Staff: If it's confidential for the customers too, please remove this post or tell me to do so.

Hey, a little groundschool before takeoff

Understanding task nodes [www.sidefx.com]
Simple TOP network example [www.sidefx.com]

The magic word is Task graph…

And those links are now “404 error” hahaha got later to the party

Is there any news yet?
I found something interesting in Houdini example folder.
There're many examples about Tops I think but doesn't complete though.
Anyway, Tops means Task Operators for sure, I think.

any clues about a Mantra GPU release with houdini h18 ?