Hi;

Following the concepts noted here for generating a shadow AOV using LPEs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5sEhWI2Iwc&ab_channel=VFXMagic [www.youtube.com]

namely, creating a custom AOV using "holdouts;shadow;CDL" - this works great in Karma CPU, but does not seem to produce any results (a black AOV) in XPU. The XPU docs suggest AOVs and LPEs are working...is there more needed to produce a similar result in XPU?

thanks!

I`ve also tried using XPU renderer i don`t think it`s supported yet.

What you can do is create 2 renders.

Renderyour object with XPU and render your shadowpasses ects with the CPU renderer.

On the bransh of Ur CPU renderer you can hide for primary rays the object you want to cast the shadows of.
(you can give this object a simpified texture 2 depending on how you`re going to use it.

And then on the other branch you can render your object in XPU

Thanks for this.

I do see I can generate a shadows pass using Karma CPU. But, is it really the case this isn't possible in XPU? This seems like pretty basic, core functionality for visual effects.

I really want to love Karma XPU, I really really do, and I really want to feel justified in jettisoning Redshift a year ago in the hopes that I could cross the finish line with projects as effectively with Karma as I'd been able to do with Redshift for years. But, dang, some days I really do feel like I'm slamming myself against a brick wall.

XPU is in beta, so expectations of it fully replacing renderers in production would be very optimistic
Knowing that it relies on MaterialX that on its own is not complete and far from full featured material description, I wouldn't keep my hopes up for the near future

But hey, You are able to play with beta software which is exciting on its own

Hey, and what about reflection catcher? How I could achieve it even with CPU?

Reflection catcher is just enabling the specular / diffuse / emission in the settings of the node.


I do agree that this is the most lacking feature in XPU.
I had hoped this would be in the 19.5 release

I really hope they can put this in the next stable release.

dhemberg
I do see I can generate a shadows pass using Karma CPU. But, is it really the case this isn't possible in XPU?

The next version of Houdini will have much better support for shadow mattes in XPU
namely
- shadow LPEs (eg "shadow;C.*")
- Holdout LPEe (eg "holdout;C.*"or "holdout;C<..'torus'>.*"etc...)