Hi folks

I'm new to Solaris and USD in general and I have a few questions.

I'm trying to render some feathers and I've been following the Entagma Feather Tutorials [www.youtube.com], but now I would like to submit my renders to a farm using Deadline. So I cache out the USD files with the USDRenderROP and send them to the farm, but the feather procedural doesn't seem to expand when rendering on the farm. Only the shafts of the feathers are being renders, but the barbs are missing.

If I force the feather procedural to expand when I save the USD file, it becomes massive, 2GB vs 20MB per frame.

We are using the sick terminal command to render the USD files in the stand alone Arnold engine outside of the Solaris Context.

So my question is, is there an away to include the HoudiniProceduralAPI used by the HoudiniPreviewProcedurals node, directly in the USD file? So that curves would be generated at render time, rather than being expanded and saved to disk?

Our issue is that we have a ton of Arnold licenses, but we have very few Houdini Render Licenses, so using an instance of Houdini Engine to render on the farm is not really an option. We need it to work with the stand alone version of Arnold.

Am I going about this the wrong way?

Any help is welcome.

The procedurals works when rendering with Husk [www.sidefx.com].

Husk needs to be connected to a working license server, but it will not claim any licenses.

Hi Heileif

Thanks for the feedback! Will husk work with Arnold as a render engine?

Yes. Every render delegate that you can use inside Solaris should probably work, I mostly use Redshift myself.