I feel a bit like an idiot asking this but: how is one meant to do a Karma render with TOPS?
I have a Solaris network in 19.5, in which I have a Karma Render Settings node configuring a path to a sequence of files I want to render, then a USD Render ROP that actually does the rendering.
Then, in a TOPnet, I have a ROP Fetch that points to the USD Render ROP. I can execute the TOP node, and a render process indeed fires. But, it seems like what the TOP considers as the output is the (temporary for me) exported USD file, rather than the images. I think I understand pedantically why this is, but it’s not what I intuitively expect...I expect to see a number of work items equal to the number of frames I render. Further, if I have downstream nodes that do something like compose all my images into a mp4 file, those nodes 1) get confused about what files they should be looking for unless I explicitly set them, and 2) trigger a re-render of the ROP fetch every time I recook them, which again is not what I want or expect (my images have been rendered, I don’t need to rerender them if I’m fiddling with ffmpeg settings to dial in a movie file’s quality).
There’s mention of setting some custom params on the ROP node itself (I think?) to try to make the TOP in question understand what its intended output files should be, but it’s not clear to me whether I’m meant to set this on the USD Render node or on the Karma Render Settings node.
Then, separately, there is a Karma TOP, with slightly different params than the RenderSettings+USDRender node combination I've been getting comfortable with in Solaris. This node has a "camera" parameter, which seems to want to point to a Houdini node location (?) rather than a USD Camera path...but my Camera node in my Solaris setup is not the terminal node in my graph, and when I try pointing this node at the real end of my LOP network, it errors when I try to render it.
Most docs for TOPS describe how to use it with Mantra, and the Karma render flow seems to involve a few more nodes and extra complexity; I'm left quite confused by all of it.
