Hello Andreas.
Any chance you would have a solution for time offseting pointinstancer instances?

is there any outstanding RFE for allowing displaycolor being picked up by the instancer in viewport without using the shader?

Its a bit complicated to have shader for viewport display color and real shader that is supposed to be used by lighting.

And I really respect and appreciate it.

robp_sidefx

martinkindl83
i really miss feature to find, where given override to parameter happens

We do have something for this - "Editor Nodes". For example, here I'm trying to track down where the subdivision scheme got set to "none" and can see it was in "edit_pCube187".

That's awesome. Had no idea.
Learning every day.
Thank you for sharing.

I think its important to pass our feedback, even the negative one as that's what might help us in a long run.

I will share my experience, which might be harsh, but believe me i love houdini.

I have over 20yrs experience, mainly lighting and lookdev for feature films and commercials. I setup several lookdev and lighting pipelines.

Lastly i started with company that is using Katana for lighting, which was enough for me to step down from lighting and move to other departments. Not saying Katana is bad, but my personal experience with using Houdini over 10years made it just hard to move to Katana.

Anyway, many Houdini artist at that company are looking forward to move back to Solaris including me. But after my experience with Solaris - all the above notes that i agree with 100%, I dont think any Katana leads would be convince-able to move to Solaris and steer the whole lighting department. Even worse, if i would be asked, as much as i love Houdini, and have not the best relationship with Katana, i would not be able to recommend moving to Solaris.


PS: Just to add to the list (which is not what this thread is about - i was really hoping someone with more experience might help me out to understand how we should be using the Solaris for lighting), i really miss feature to find, where given override to parameter happens. In Katana you have yellow icon indicating that the default value has changed, but also have option to see, where the change is coming from. This feature is missing in Solaris and its pretty crucial feature for debugging.

Thank you

i would say its viewport trying to hide them

my workflow for that is simply dont display instancer in viewport

but then comes the issues of rendering as viewport only renders whats visible in viewport, making it unusable for any heavy scene

rendering to Mplay will work fine while things are hidden from viewport

yep, can do RFE

also double checking this:

Just making sure that i havent missed anything: progressive rendering is only available in viewport or clone right? no other oprions would give us progressive render or autoupdates on shader/parm change.

Thank you Rob for looking into it.
I think it looks like we are after the old renderView features.

Viewport rendering:
it renders only whats visible to viewport: if i hide payload it wont render (but would if i would do render to EXR), if i have 50mil point cloud, loading it into viewport is very not great, even if i display it as poits, if i hide it from viewport it wont render - but still would render into EXR.

Just making sure that i havent missed anything: progressive rendering is only available in viewport or clone right? no other oprions would give us progressive render or autoupdates on shader/parm change.


As for viewport, to be honest i cant fully comment on Karma, as we mainly use Arnold. It failed me too many times for me to trust it. Mainly with changing render settings, AOVs, or just changing things around, even flick OpenGL<>Arnold doenst solve it. Also something i found out yesterday, Muting layers does correctly render in viewport, giving you hope that your hidden layer will not render, but it does render into EXR (we found that we have to use something else then configure stage to be able to hide layers for renders).

Hello.
I have already burned lot of time testing but nothing usable came out. So trying others.

Currently i was very disappointed with render options in Solaris and ways how we can check our results.

What we want is option to have IPR - progressive render going, being able to change values and see them reflecting in render. Be able to save and compare with previous renders. As easy and basic as it sounds, there is no solid option for that in Solaris.


Rendering into viewport (that was the first one i ruled out), is not good representative of the final render we would see in EXRs. The viewport doesn't update or show true nature of things and i dont trust it to validate our results. Is not usable for heavy scenes and will not render things that are payload unloaded from viewport. It only renders whats physically visible in viewport, which cant be used for example with big instances, as we cant load that many geo into viewport to check renders. But does support progressive rendering.


Using Clone option (second ruled out), which supports progressive rendering and is pretty true to what we would get in final results, mostly doesnt work in production scenes, as its failing to start Clone to get pixels from. Works like a treat with simple scene with RubberToy


Rendering in BackgroundRender doenst work with IPR, but is pretty good representation what we will actually render and is true to what will be present in EXR. Unfortunately doesn't seem to support anamorphic lens, and renders square image for those anamorphic cameras.

Render to Mplay is same as Background Render very true to final exports, supports anamorphic lense, but is missing progressive updates, and every change of shading parameter needs new render. Comparing images is also not great.

Im looking for ideas and suggestions.

Hello
im digging this old thread out.
I have anamorphic lens. In viewport it looks correct, same when rendered to disk or Mplay. But when i render into RenderGalery using Background Render i end up with square image.
Anyone knows about a fix or is that a common thing waiting to be fixed?

Problem always was connect to the clone.
On simple scene its not a problem. On production 99% of the time we are not able to connect to the clone.
No error that would help.

Once i spend half day deleting nodes until i was able to connect to clone, but wasn't able to track it down, as it was more like random, not any actual node that would do that.

That would be awesome Rob. Thank you for the heads up.

I was quite excited about clone option, unfortunately it only worked in simple scenes. Was never able to make it work on production scenes. Currently we render to mplay without interactive render or snaps with background render as the rendering into viewport has its own limitations and we keep it in opengl only.

I believe there is no renderRegion support right, while using Mplay

all those options seems to be trying to patch the core missing feature

renderView, with live renders, compare option and renderRegions

i have to agree

we are slowly jumping onto the USD train and this is key feature that is missing from lighting department/workflow perspective.

Viewport render is great, but except old XSI i never used it, only renderView, where you can snap, compare to live renders.
USe viewport for navigation, not rendering.

jsmack
I'm not sure if the file sop is compilable, but the fastest way to load multiple files, by far, is unpacking packed disk primitives. You can create packed disk primitives and set their path in vex now. Then you simply unpack.

hello jsmack
any chance you can explain a bit what you meant? i might be a bit slow on this one.

I can see i can bring packed disk primitives with file sop, but thats not what you are talking about.
then i tried filesop with default geo and load it as packed disk primitives, then in vex set the path to my actual geo and unpack. Clearly im missing what you meant in your setup.
Martin

same here

Thank you.
Yes that's exactly what I was after. Not to fix the compile block but basically have something like HDA invoke.
Something that can invoke node/nodes from elsewhere in the scene.

hello mate
any new info on this one?
how did the RFE go?

im also looking into this

Any update on this?