Hello. Congrats on the release first things first!

Coming from mantra here, and I will be collecting my thoughts and/or quirks of Karma, if anyone has other finds please let's have it posted here, in one thread. Let's have some constructive feedback and conversation here!

So, I'll start with bugs and wrong behavior:
Occlusion and Dirt masks have buggy results (see screenshot)
Bevel mask gave me a hard crash


triplanar and fresnel working as expected

having a vop noise attached through the ramp works, yet tweaking the ramp sliders still has that freezing from mantra

https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/15603/ [www.sidefx.com]

Will submit RFEs asap. This thread could be used as to avoid further duplicates, and to gather “forum talk” style of impressions if someone else is interested.
edit: submitted rfe feedback via website form (option #3)

I hope you continue making posts like this glichi(and others). I was/am a novice with mantra and if it wasn't for the fact that I knew Karma was coming out would have taken up your recent rendering/mantra tutorials.

However, with Karma out I'm going to be trying to keep up through tuts and forum posts like this to get a better understanding of rendering with Karma.

Thanks for posting instead of just filing rfe/bug in the background.

It's expected that dirt/occlusion masks don't work with Karma. trace/gather are not allowed in Karma.

jsmack
It's expected that dirt/occlusion masks don't work with Karma. trace/gather are not allowed in Karma.

Where can we find such information?

It's far from expected for me gotta be honest. Especially considering that the “What's new” section states:

Houdini 18 introduces SideFX Solaris - a USD-based context for lookdev, layout and lighting

am i missing some information? also, fresnel is working, which is rendertime effect as well?

Lookdev means create and assign materials. Which LOPs can do independently of Karma.
There are some mantra features that are not yet working or supported in Karma. It was released as beta. Tracing from surface shaders is one that I'm not sure is coming to Karma. It is horribly inefficient to allow arbitrary tracing from surface shaders. I'm sure there will be a solution to replace them eventually. The baking tools in development by the labs are promising. Of course it doesn't help for geo that isn't or can't be unwrapped. I hope there will eventually be C++ style shaders for karma that add back these missing capabilities.

I assume the features like those work inside LOPs in Redshift, and Karma is just bugging out/does not support it? Whether doing things like that is efficient or not is irrelevant to the situation. Also, personal thought, using the AO to mask some dust in a scene using some let's say geometry standing on some floor/table, isn't that an efficient way actually to do that? I'm not sure if i am confused or whether we are talking about slightly different things. Regardless, i've sent the rfe and will wait for a response. If it's a limitation and/or not supported featureset, would be great to hear from devs.

glitchi
I assume the features like those work inside LOPs in Redshift, and Karma is just bugging out/does not support it? Whether doing things like that is efficient or not is irrelevant to the situation. Also, personal thought, using the AO to mask some dust in a scene using some let's say geometry standing on some floor/table, isn't that an efficient way actually to do that? I'm not sure if i am confused or whether we are talking about slightly different things. Regardless, i've sent the rfe and will wait for a response. If it's a limitation and/or not supported featureset, would be great to hear from devs.

Please, keep us informed, I'm constantly using shaders where baking style solutions like jsmack proposed are not a viable way. I hope not much functionality from Mantra is sacrificed, I really love its flexibility.

Enabling noise within smoke shader gives glitches similar to previous screenshot

edit: submitted proper bugreport

jsmack
It's expected that dirt/occlusion masks don't work with Karma. trace/gather are not allowed in Karma.

That just makes me sad. There are plenty of real production use cases where one would want to send out rays to probe the scene that don't fall into the BSDF domain.

Even OSL still supports trace() functions.

jpparkeramnh

jsmack
It's expected that dirt/occlusion masks don't work with Karma. trace/gather are not allowed in Karma.

That just makes me sad. There are plenty of real production use cases where one would want to send out rays to probe the scene that don't fall into the BSDF domain.

Even OSL still supports trace() functions.

Don't worry, we don't have the official word on this yet…