Hi there,

I am trying to wrap my head around procedurals, and how they could be used in a workflow where I am not rendering in Houdini, but in Katana (I know Katana is not great for USD, but please don't mind that)

Say I have a box, I fracture that box, and then cache that as an USD, then I sublayer the fractured box on top of the original one. N

Then I simulate that fractured box with bullet and bring it back into solaris using an RBD Procedural, if I were to render directly in houdini, it woul work as it is, but how would you cache that procedural, so then you can sublayer it on top of the original USD, and then be able to render on a different package other than houdini?

I added a simple file to explain a bit better my question.

Thanks.
Hernan.

The RBD Procedural is a Husk procedural - it gets evaluated when husk runs and bakes the result of the procedural into the usd that husk feeds the renderer.
Under the hood, the RBD Procedural is the equivalent to a deforming fractured mesh with the various parts of the mesh being transformed by points - either as a points primitive stored on the stage or a bgeo point cache. The main advantage of this is you don't have to worry about writing out all the deformed mesh animation to disk, which can take up significant amounts of disk space, as this is done just in time before rendering.
If you are going to Katana, husk won't run and husk procedurals won't be executed.
You can export your RBD sims to USD as deforming meshes or as animated Xforms depending on your needs and what performs the best for you.

Hi, yeah, that is what I have been doing so far, caching xforms, and then valuecliping them for the rigid objects, and caching deforming geo for any metal bending geometry, the only reason I tried the rbdprocedural was because that way I didn't have to increment the primitive count to biblical proportions, but at least now I know that I am not doing anything stupid.


Thanks!

If the prim count is an issue, you can deform the fractured mesh instead like you do with your bending metal but while your stage will be happier with fewer prims, your disk space will take the hit instead. That was the motivating factor behind the RBD Procedural.