Apologies for the absurdly noob question, but with Houdini Engine is there any way to render something that is in a Maya scene, but through Houdini without caching out files?

Eg, animation dept want to do a quick render of their characters - could an otl that encapsulates a lop graph be sent through hou engine to Maya, and renders executed from the Maya side?

I realize this is probably a pipe dream but thought I'd throw it out there.

It should be possible if you promote the render button of your ROP to your HDA.

Would that be able to be cached to usd and sent to Husk?

So I gave this a whirl. My otl is just a sphere, camera, and Karma Lop all linked up.

I exported using Houdini 19.0.657, and in Maya 2022.4 I loaded the Houdini Engine Plugin. When I went Houdini Engine > Load Asset...
and got this error:


Should I be pointing to an hda and not an otl?
Do I need to set up a port to Maya per this page? https://www.sidefx.com/docs/maya/_maya__session.html [www.sidefx.com]

Ah, If I make an OBJ level otl with a lopnet inside I get somewhere. Will report back!