I have a setup where all the parameters of my HDA are being driven by work item attributes using the special attribute arrays in PDG -
hdaparms_floats
hdaparms_ints
hdaparms_strings
hdaparms_buttons

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/top/hdaprocessor.html [www.sidefx.com]

However there doesn't seem to be any way of driving ramps parameters or even color or vector parameters from work item attributes or am I missing something?

Thanks for any info here!

Thank you! but I was looking for a way to feed them into an HDA Processor like how you can use them to drive node parameters. I haven't been able to find a way without parsing them out with python though.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/top/hdaprocessor.html [www.sidefx.com]

The HDA processor will automatically read work item values into drive the HDA if you write their names in one of the three arrays such as -
hdaparms_floats


But no sign of a way to drive them from a dictionary insteady.

In 20.5 it looks like a lot of support for dictionaries were added which seams great but I'm trying to figure out how I can have a dictionary attribute drive the parameters of an HDA processor. Seems like it should be possible but I can't find documentation or examples.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/news/20_5/pdg.html [www.sidefx.com]

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks so much!

I'm trying to use Karma to bake but I want to bake multiple objects (that are already atlased)

Using this for how to bake -
https://tokeru.com/cgwiki/HoudiniLops.html#texture_baking_with_karma [tokeru.com]



It doesn't seem like it works for multiple object by default though?

I'm now trying a sop edit where I'm combining USD objects and trying to output them into a new USD that has them combined but I'm struggling to get multiple materials on geometry subsets working in USD though.

You can see the setup is two different USD prims get combined into one so they can be baked together, however I can't maintain the material seperation while keeping them a single prim mesh, I think I need to use geosubset but I can't seem to get it working.

I tried shop_materialpath as well as usdmaterialpath


Any tips would be really appreciated!

Is it just me or does the new vulkan viewport not show VDB SDF surfaces by default? I don't know if there is a way to turn them on. Going to try going back to the openGL viewport.

This was a bit of a tough one for me, but I think I figure out how to do world space displacement in MaterialX without using anything outside of the spec.

Trick is to use dot products instead of matrix.

Take your world space vector (Wind Direction in my case) and then do a dot with tangent, bitangent and normal and combine into a vector. This seems to work well so far.

Hope this helps someone else because this too me way too long to figure out! Thanks!

Bump. Any ideas on how to get time-dependent displacements to update? Thanks!

I'm probably missing something, I can't seem to get my materialX material displacement to update based on time.

I used the same time setup to pan the UV coordinates for the flame texture but can't seem to get it to update the displacement. Seems to always evaluate displacement as if the frame / time = 0

Any ideas? This is in LOPS / Stage area using USD. Really want to be able to use materialX to make things like a simple water shader etc.

Thanks so much!

Scientifically accurate Dune Solver that models the way dunes naturally form. Written in OpenCL this solver runs extremely fast. Clients include NASA for Mars & Climate change research. Tutorial videos on my youtube, and feel free to request more.






Now available on Orbolt
https://www.orbolt.com/asset/LuckyPause::dunesolver


Thank you!

+1 Bumping this.

Orbolt is a great idea, but a dated implementation.

I'd love to see SideFX give it love in several ways:

Update the website so it doesn't feel so dated, I know this seems purely cosmetic but unfortunately I think it makes a difference when users are comparing buying assets from Gumroad or Artstation then you see Orbolt... and it just comes across as almost abandoned. Please look at other modern digital stores, I like artstation & gumroad a lot, epic marketplace as well.

Needs a way for sellers to easily refund users (maybe I missed it?)

I also find it harder to prepare & sell an asset on orbolt than gumroad, even an HDA. If I sell on gumroad I can package a zip file with anything, multiple hip files, hda's, pdf documentation etc. With Orbolt I have to do things like stip the HDA version number because Orbolt gets confused and will think a different asset version is a different asset. I couldn't get the orbolt tools built into houdini to even work.

Maybe I'm missing it but it also doesn't seem like there is an easy way to edit an orbolt listing. I had listed three videos on my Orbolt page and it ordered them last to first on the asset page. I wanted to change the order so edited the page and it acts like you are uploading a new asset version.

----------------------

All that said, I think it would really be best if SideFX takes an approach like valve does with steam - let us upload & sell assets with orbolt, handle the licence conversions and licensing.... but also give us asset keys like steam does to allow us to sell orbolt managed & hosted assets though other asset stores such as artstation & gumroad.

Steam does this and it has only helped them because it ensures that even if you can do all your own promotion, hosting etc. you still might as well put it on steam and sell steam keys because valve doesn't even get a cut from a steam key.

I think sidefx / houdini & orbolt are a perfect use case for this steam / steam key type approach.

Thank you for reading!

Crashing on me half the time when I make the node visible and half the time when I try to render with it.
I'm kind of at a loss. Usually it says it's a segmentation fault.

updated graphics card drivers and increased the TdrDelay and TdrDdiDelay to 240 each.

I filed a bug report but I hoping to find a solution asap so posting here as well incase anyone has other suggestions to try.
Any one have other ideas please? Thanks!

Phew! Answering my own question here in case anyone else runs into this problem.

Problem was I had "Use OPlibraries Files to Find OTLs" checked under the Asset Manager configuration tab.

The documentation doesn't seem very clear to me but apparently houdini won't scan $HSITE/houdini18.5 etc. for *.hda files if you have this OPlibraries checked. I don't ever remember changing this setting before though so I'm not sure if sidefx changed the default state of this checkbox or the function changed.


Hopefully I won't run into a problem where this conflicts with plugins or something down the line.

I used to have this working but had to reinstall windows. I can't seem to get this working now.

I have a directory where I have all my hda files:
L:\LuckyPause\HoudiniLuckyPause\houdini18.5\otls

Using the windows 10 environment variable editor thing I have set
HSITE = L:\LuckyPause\HoudiniLuckyPause

I've used the texporter in houdini to echo $HSITE and it comes back correctly.
Yet none of my hda assets are being loaded. Do I need to make a package json? I though houdini would already look in $HSITE?

Any help is super appreciated! Thank you!

toadstorm
If you're distributing your tool via Orbolt, SideFX will upgrade the license from Indie to FX for you. Otherwise, you would need an FX license to create and distribute FX tools yourself. Big studios can't do the license upgrade for you, so they'd be pretty unlikely to license your tool if it was .HDALC.

Is there anyway to use orbolt to distribute a paid tool though?

Can it be blackboxed?

Thanks!

polygosh
For posterity's sake:

I had the same issue preventing me from submitting to Gridmarkets. The hip file was huge (>2GB) and I solved the error by doing some housekeeping and getting the file size down to less than 1GB.

Thanks! This solved it for me as well. My hip file was also just over 2GB. Seems to be the limit, might be a windows thing or something idk?

I just unfroze enough nodes and used cache bgeo files where needed.

I think I solved the issue. Posting a follow up here incase it helps someone else.
I did a bunch of things, they probably aren't all necessary. I had upgraded my cpu, motherboard and ram.

1. did a 'upgrade in place' for windows 10.
2. re-installed all drivers, as well as Houdini and redshift
3. set TDR delay in the registry to 240, probably not needed.

At this point it was actually worse - Houdini would crash about 20 seconds after opening it each time. I'd open Houdini, place a sphere go to move the sphere and crash.

Searching around I discovered some people have an issue with a Nahimic service which is part of the audio drivers that are installed with some motherboards like my Asus / AMD board. As soon as I disabled this service Houdini worked again and the freezing delay that seemed to be happening with OpenCL nodes is gone!

Hope that helps someone!

Having a strange problem. I recently upgraded my motherboard, cpu and ram. Houdini steams to work well normally but when I open some scenes I had been working on that loop over some black-box OpenCL nodes it freezes every frame update for ~11 seconds. It doesn't even show anything in the status bar and becomes unresponsive during this time. These same scenes took maybe 1 second before and wouldn't have this sort of blank no-status freeze issue.


If I make new opencl nodes they seem to work ok, maybe a little more freezing than before.

I'm at a loss as the computer seems to be working well otherwise. Checking my openCL settings it's set to use my gpu as it should be.

I tried updating drivers etc.
Any tips on how to track this issue down? Thanks!

Hope this thread isn't too

rmagee

1manarmyworkshop
If I use HDA Asset in the Starter kit for unreal, and all changes are make in unreal. Do I still need to purchase commercial license if I am making a commercial game?

In case I misunderstood your question. The free Houdini Engine for Unreal license is a commercial license and can be used to make a commercial game. I was referencing the assets themselves which are made available for use in your projects.

The place where you might need to buy a Houdini license is if you want to make your own custom assets. Then Houdini Core or FX would be needed.

Robert Magee, I've made a sand dune simulator I'm looking to sell through gumroad. I have a Houdini Indie license and when save out the dune simulator HDA's they save in a .hda library. I'm wondering if I sell these hda setup will FX license holders be able to use them? Does making them black box assets affect this? How can I tell what license a hda file has?

Thanks!

Oh awesome! Thanks, I saw that video too but I think I kinda flipped through some parts. Nice!

Thanks for those examples!

I was under the impression though it would be good to use the built in opencl iteration vs a compile block because using the iterations on the opencl node means the data stays on the graphics card rather than the card having to get all the data each iteration if using a solver or compile block. That was just my understanding though, not sure if that is correct.

I thought of one other way that I haven't tried but I think might work - use the writeback to check if the work id is 0, if it is then iterate a global int *

I think that will work? I might try it. I have some opencl nodes inside a solver and I'd kind of like to try sub-stepping them internally if that makes sense...