Hi,

I have a LOP network where I'm using a Restructure node to organize my scene and then a Prune to render isolated objects.

Everything looks fine in the viewport, but then when I output to USD and render, some objects are missing and I get black frames in the EXRs.

It appears that I am doing something wrong in the way I am changing the scene hierarchy or the way I am referencing primitives.

It's very difficult for me to troubleshoot since what I see in the viewport is not what I see when outputting a USD and rendering from it. Is it possible to set up Solaris so that I only see in the viewport exactly what I would see when outputting and rendering from a USD? Like why do objects seem to be kept in memory when they are pruned and shouldn't be there?

Lights are coming in to LOPs via a Scene import from the OBJ context. I would like to place all my lights under their own Light primitive. However, changing the parenting of objects seems to have the effect of excluding those objects from the USD output. How do I correctly handle changing parenting?

To debug this situation, I'd recommend Disabling the "Command" on the USD Render ROP (i.e. tell the ROP to not run husk on the output). Then make sure that the option to delete the generated USD files after running the ROP is turned Off. Then in LOPs (probably in a clean Houdini session) use a Sublayer LOP to load the __render__.usd file generated by the USD Render ROP. This is as close as you can get to seeing in Houdini the same thing that husk will be rendering.

As one possible source of problems, make sure that in your Houdini session you have cleared all "Viewport Overrides" set in the scene graph tree. These overrides live in the Houdini session only and are never written to the generated USD files on disk.

I think the Scene Import LOP has a parameter that lets you choose a "root" prim for the import? If you're importing both lights and geometry, you may need to split your import into two separate Scene Import nodes (one for lights, one for everything else) so that only the lights are affects by the choice of "root prim".

Or, you can make a Null object, and connect it to the input of each light object. This parenting setup worked fine for me, so if you are having trouble with scene importing parented objects, it would be helpful if you could post a hip file so I can see exactly what you're attempting to do.

Thanks mtucker. I've tried a few of those things without success. I am sending you a DM with a link to the file and some notes.