My question is: When I use Longitude and Latitude in the Physical Sky node, which way is North in the Houdini coordinate system? I would assume negative Z, which is equivalent to the Zero angle when using the Azimuth parameter. Is this correct?
Thanks

Amazing. A whole thread about something you just have to click on in other applications.... The essence of Houdini.

So it seems the only efficient solution to this problem is still using another software if you don't want to spend additional time setting up multiple passes and comp it?

Shame...

AnimGraphLab
Just in case, for someone still figuring out..

1. Open Houdini -> Alt+Shift+P (Python Shell).
2. Paste the code below replacing your old and new keymap paths. I keep them at Documents/houdini.

For Windows:

import keymaputils
keymaputils.importV1KeymapBindingsToKeymapFile(
    "C:\\Users\\<YOUR_USERNAME>\\Documents\\houdini20.5\\animgraphlab_hotkeys_20.5.keymap2", 
    "C:\\Users\\<YOUR_USERNAME>\\Documents\\houdini20.5\\animgraphlab_hotkeys.keymap", 
    "C:\\Users\\<YOUR_USERNAME>\\Documents\\houdini20.5\\animgraphlab_hotkeys_20.5_NEW.keymap2", 
    "KeymapName"
)

animgraphlab_hotkeys_20.5.keymap2is a default keymap from H20.5 that I manually saved.

Ondrej mentioned about it: "to act as source from which we will look up the bindings in the old .keymap file and generate a new .keymap2 file".


In my case, all hotkeys were updated.

Thank you but this can't be seriously a way to load hotkey configurations in 5k software, can it?
Are there any plans to make Hotkey management user friendly again? Eben manually configuring hotkeys is time consuming and tedious.
But somehow it seems to fit into the grand scheme of things.... Houdini is now my most time consuming part of my job. It actually costs me more than I get paid for because no one pays me for configuring hotkeys. And I can't hire a TD for that

Edit: Even the Help file is not updated for the lack of a search bar. Am I missing some thing?
I have no way of knowing what all the action terms are so the filter is of no use. I am trying to set a hot key for a radial menu in the node tree but filtering to "radial" yield zero results. How is anybody supposed to work this way?

Wow. Just wow. I was trying for half an hour to import my hotkeys. Now I find this thread. On the positive side: I am not crazy. On the negative side: Wow. Just Wow.

jaspergar5da7395b446a467c
I have had this issue every time I have used this tool and find it absolutely mind blowing that this has not been resolved in years.

I am struggling with this right now. Funnily enough it does not happen when you set extrusion mode to planar. But that cause massive problems during frustrum limited dicing.
I seem to have a clean version now by changing the pad bounds "expressione from ch("particlesep") * ch("voxelsize") * 40" to "* 80", doubling it. I also had an extrude division of 100 and changed to 20 (extrude distance 512) and that seemed to have helped as well.
But I'm not sure if it is clean by mere coincidence now, since I don't know the cause. And neither does anybody else it would seem.

This issue has cost me two whole days now. There is no point in using amazing tools if one ends up losing time instead of saving.
Pleas SideFX, look into it.

Am I confused or is Houdini?

I just discovered it, not yet reported.
But there seems to me more things wrong with the viewport:
The 2D Pan and Zoom applies the Zoom or Pan wrong to the Background image, making it useless (in Solaris the Zoom works but the BG image doesn't follow panning). Also custom Wireframecolors do not seem to get applied to object wireframes.

While the new options for camera background images are welcome, the background image does not seem to support numbered sequences.
The frame number variable ($F8) always defaults to the current frame and removes the variable in the display settings dialogue.
This is an oversight, isn't it? Instead of making the sequences load into 128 gig RAM, not my GPU's 12 gig Vram, which I prefer to use for rendering, I now have to add yet another step to the workflow, having to convert all my sequences to video first.
I hope this gets fixed soon. And thought through.

user1111
I think you might want what is in the render geometry settings lop perhaps? For Karma you can set the holdout mode there for the geometry as None, Matte or Background.

Sorry for the late response, yes I think that is what I was looking for.
Thanks, a year later

I fixed this by switching back to Redshift and not using Solaris. I do not have time to "R&D" this.

tamte

OneBigTree
Still no solution in 19.5?
What's the holdup?

I personally haven't used Karma much, but there is this since 19
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/lop/backgroundplate.html [www.sidefx.com]

Does it not provide AOVs you are after?

I am not looking for AOVs I need a Matte shader for catching shadows and mask objects in the scene with complex geometry, like the Redshift Matte_Shadow - without having to go through a comp first. As far as I understand the Background plate is meant to catch a camera projection to interact with the scene.
I have also a bunch of problems with controlling render visibility using the standard matte shader for Mantra (which works in a way in solaris) but it is all too much hassle for the quick turnaround I need.

https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/86688/ [www.sidefx.com]

Edit:
I tried the Background plate but it seems just as problematic and it doesn't exactly do what I need.

tamte
It's not technically a problem in Houdini, you just need a tool with a state that does the conversion

and I think Edit SOP would be a good node to include such options

Since how it works in other apps it's just values entered in a tool state that get applied to whatever the final object space coordinates are, to avoid creating any live dependency which would not be desirable for adhoc editing of a geo

I think everything that would actually need a dependency can be solved in other ways. I am just looking for a quick way to push a point or a group of point to a specific value in space. If I could even do that across multiple objects (without merging them first), that would change life for me in Houdini.
I think ( again) of a set of imported geometry spread over different hierarchies for example. If I could just grab some points of multiple objects and do a simple point transform, that would be great.
If there was a way to automatically create nodes in a node tree at user defined insert points so they could be created from the object level for a selection of objects.... But I'm probably dreaming a bit there....

Yes well, another year of Redshift then, until Karma goes from production ready to artist friendly

Also make sure that your AI curve is clean. Illustrator files might contain curve points too close together or even self intersecting curves. I'd resample the curve first in any case.

I am trying to create Matte/Shadow Objects for rendering with Karma.
I am not trying to render AOV shadow passes. I need complex matte geometry to receive shadows, as it is possible in, well, any other 3D app.
MaterialX has no matte/shadow shader and rendering different passes and combining them in a composite is not the solution I am looking for. I need to render everything in one go.

So I am using the Mantra matte/shadow shader, which seems to work on the shader side with Karma, (Although I have no way to check the alpha channel in the Karma render viewport for some reason). But now the problem is that the matte object is being reflected in the scene and none of the render visibility settings seems to change this. Also I need to control shadow casting and self-shadowing and I do not see any options or settings to do this. As I said, I can not even check the alpha to see if the matte object is casting shadows on itself.
What am I missing here? Any help appreciated.

jsmack

Mike_A
Ugh...
As a relatively new user I'm already developing something of a love/hate relationship with Houdini. I do realise that H takes a major shift in mindset when coming from any other DCC, but things like this really leave me scratching my head in frustration.

We all know H as this uber powerful piece of software, where 'everything is a point'... and yet there isn't a realistic way to place a point at a specific location in world space at SOP level. Really?

You can't edit in world space because that would require concatenating the transform from the object parents and applying the inverse to the point position. You can do this, but it will create a dependency and possible animation on vertex data. It's not feasible to have this built in to any point editing field.

Why is it possible in other applications? In Softimage you could even edit points in world space even on an animated mesh deformed by a character rig. Why is this so problematic in Houdini?

I noticed too that volumes are pretty noisy in Karma. Not using it because of that for volumes.

dlee
Hi. Karma does not yet support shadow matte or have a shadow catcher. As a workaround you could output shadowed and unshadowed AOVs and take the difference to generate a shadow pass in comp.

Still no solution in 19.5?
What's the holdup?

Is there any real solution to this yet? Like an actual matte/shadow shader?