Just opened usd asset made in 20.5 in 21 and noticed that the normal maps looked weird in some places. They all had in common that they didn’t have any uvs and had 3d noises going into the normal map of the shader. I quickly added uvs to the objects and everything looked fine.
I can’t remember that this was an issue in Houdini 20.1?

Is it possible to use kinefx to pose a mesh then export that mesh out as static geometry? Use case for this is being able to match the pose of some clothing assets from a marketplace to my reference character so I can easily align the cloth and transfer weights to the cloth.

We're working with some custom AOVs and I'm wondering if anyone knows what determines the order of the render vars in the Render Outputs dropdown in the viewport as well as which rendervar ends up as rgba when opened in nuke?
Is there some sort of ranking order, creation order, alphabetical pattern, attribute aso that we need to follow in order to control this?

I'm having a hard time figuring out a pattern.

For example I would like to name our "beauty" either beauty or preferable rgba and always have it at the top of the list in render outputs and be the primary selection when kicking off a new render and also become the rgba channel in nuke.

We currently have a bunch of other aovs like albedo, LIGHT_light1, LIGHT_light2, depth(Z) aso
and it seems like the sorting in the dropdown is arbitrary and LIGHT1 ends up in the rgba channel in nuke.
See attached image 1.

Even using the karmarendersetting nodes render vars it seems the list order is arbitrary. See attached image 2.

In H20.5 the "rgba" rendervar worked in nuke and became the primary channel but in H21 the same naming is no longer working, I'm assuming this has to do with the H21 redesign of the rendervar node.

Any help in how we can control this or what rules we need to follow would be highly appreciated.

We are using H21.0.512 on windows 10 in case that matters.

Hi!

I've got about 100 cameras in my scene. I made a script that gives a list of all cameras that can see a specifique geo/asset. I wanted to know how to use my list in the Find Node window to find all cameras...

...As I was writing this post, I found it! You need to use | like this:

Camera_A | Camera_B | Camera_Z

-Olivier

Hello!

I've used Houdini to create bone capture weights for a hard surface character. I'm working with USD and need to export it again as such. My problem is that I do not know how to export these in a way where Blender understands it as vertex groups instead of primvars.





I create the skeleton in blender, skinning in Houdini and then I will create the rig in Blender again. Any help is appreciated!

I'm trying to render a ripple simulation in Mantra. I've created bgeos from the simulation, and I added an ocean shader. However, when I tried rendering it out in Mantra,
I didn't see anything even in the alpha channel. How do I render out this simulation so I can actually see it in Mantra?

Hi everyone,

We built a page and tool that lets you copy and paste Houdini node recipes from the website directly into any Houdini context. So far we've compiled a small collection of recipes we use in our projects. Check it out here: https://codercat.xyz/cookbook/ [codercat.xyz]

Hello There,
I’ve been experimenting with animation on H21, and while the tool has quite matured since the last version of Houdini, I’m having trouble with my workflow involving animating cycles. Most of the tools currently available in the scene animation are either buggy or unfriendly for that kind of workflow.

I tried to report some of these bugs, but they haven’t been addressed in a while, as I have been told that the problem is how the feature I’m trying to use works and why they aren’t just bugs. So I’d like to discuss my problem here in the hope that these will be addressed in a future Houdini update.

My workflow involves doing a lot of small cycle animations, often very simple; each cycle usually lasts between 1 to 5 seconds, and often involves using a limited number of keys that form a sinusoidal shape, relying on the tangent handles to tweak it.

To demonstrate, here is a little gif showing the idea:
and the curve (for demonstration purposes, I’ll limit to showing the X axis only; notice that this is an extreme case demonstration, where every key has a very specific tangent defined, including the first and last key): .

If I want to mirror that motion to the mirror controller, I can use the mirror with plane tool and the bake feature. That’s where the problem starts:
To mirror this animation, I have to use the ‘bake’ tool, which forces me to: resample keys, break the tangents of the first and last frame, and worse: break the tangents of the first and last key of ALL my controllers.

Target Motion Curve:

Original Controller Curve (and any other controller that had a specific tangent defined):

The information of the animation is entirely lost.

Using the Mirror tool to bake the motion of one controller to another will break EVERY tangent information from the first and last key of all my controllers; that’s a very destructive process.

I understand that I can avoid this “every controller gets rebaked” by baking information into a new layer, but that’s not something I want to do. I wish to mirror my animation into the opposite side controller and keep working on both without the hassle of a layer.

When I mirror a controller, I want to keep all my keys as they are. My source controller has 4 keys with manually defined tangents; I would like my target controller to also end with 4 keys and their manually defined tangents, as I’d still wish to tweak the motion once mirrored. I do not want to resample my keys.

It would also be very convenient if, when the channel extrapolation is set to “Cycle”, the auto-tangent would automatically guess the slope based on the extrapolation information, as it’s currently something I have to manually set every time I tweak a key.




I’ve been trying to explore alternatives, for example by constraining each controller to a custom-made constraint where the motion is defined in terms of placing controls in key positions, as such:
.
However, there seem to be several limitations in what is possible with constraint currently :

- None of the SplineResample/Interpolate nodes in Apex feature ‘closed loop’ mode. Or lets you output the interpolated rotation information from the input matrix ( I want my constraint's controller rotation to describe the rotation of the driven controller, rather than follow the curve's own tangent)
- There is no way to sample an attribute using primuv (aside from using a vexsnippet in Apex, which is eww), so I can’t get the rotation information I actually want from the curve.
- There’s no way to output a visualizer shape in a custom constraint, making it difficult to accurately edit the motion curve during animation.

This is my two cents about a niche workflow. It’s more of a ‘video game’ focused workflow, but when it’s 80% of what you do, these few points would mean a lot if they could be addressed in the futur!

Thanks for reading

Hi!

I had a presentation on our Pax Dei world generation pipeline at the Everything Procedural Conference last April.

If you're interested in large scale game world generation, procedural techniques, Houdini and Unreal, take a look!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vlyt8lDx-Zk&t=5s [www.youtube.com]

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The pipeline I have is as follows:

1- I create the model in Maya with its groups and purposes:

book/
geometry
render --- purpose render
proxy --- purpose proxy


Output: asset_name_model.usdc

2- In Maya, I create a stage and make a payload reference to asset_name_model.usdc, then I duplicate it in the scene, simulating the Set Dressing department.

Output: setdress.usda


3-In Houdini Surface Setup:

book_geometry - prepend references = @../../../model/Props/book/book_model.usdc@

book_materials - def Scope "materials"

book_payload - prepend references = [
@./book_materials.usda@,
@./book_geometry.usda@
]

book_surface - prepend payload = @./book_payload.usda@ and set up __class__

I also create the setup for geometry and shader variants.


4- In Houdini, I create the Sublayer, load setdress.usda, and then reference book_surface.usda.

The problem I’m facing is that I can successfully switch material variants, but when I try to switch geometry variants, it still keeps the geometry that’s being read from the file exported from Maya (setdress.usda).

The workaround I’ve come up with is to create a copy of setdress.usda and change the paths to book_surface.usda, but I’d like to be able to do that directly from Houdini and export a new USD layer containing the shader information for all duplicated assets with their variant model and material changes.

Thanks.

のですがどのようにやるのが良いでしょうか？よろしくお願いします。

I'm trying to figure out the Houdini Engine(8.0.3) interface to get instancing working for UE5.6.1.

The geometry included with HDA instances just fine.

However, I try to change the instance object to a UE5 object and nothing seems to work.

I even tried adding a point attribute(unreal_instance) but that doesn't change anything.

Any suggestions what might be going on?

Hey!

Working on my first rig and have two things I am not able to solve.

1. How can I set up something so the wrist can be rotated more flexible without moving the whole arm.
Like for example moving the arm/hand in front of the head and turning the wrist or something.

2. How can i prevent the arm from rotating when getting extended?

Overall would be awesome if someone with more experience could take a look and point out where improvements could be made.


Thanks!

Can someone produce a minimal materialX file that loads directly in assetreference, and produces a working material ?

This must have a displacement node inside; the ones that ship with the AMD GPUOpen library in MatLinker never have a displacement texture, which is unfortunate, because some sources of their material actually have displacement; support told me they can't do anything about it because it is made by AMD.

One starting point could be a mtlx file from:
ambientcg.com
https://ambientcg.com/view?id=PavingStones141 [ambientcg.com]

which has the usual PBR textures + displacement.

The displacement scale is typically too high, so I can definitely scale it down beforehand.
But after it's loaded in assetreference, it kinda works, then breaks as soon as I try to edit it.
I have then to recheck each file checkbox inside the network after it's loaded in Edit Material Network to make it work again

Does anyone have an export to AE workflow that functions with H21.0.440? I tried dom__AEexport__2.1 but it doesn't seem to load.

Thanks! T

This Sunday at 10am we are doing maintenance on our SideFX servers (for 6 hours). During this time no one will be able to purchase a new Houdini license or move any Houdini licenses. Our site will be in read-only mode.

Hey everyone! Houdini newbie here. can anyone help me figure out how to automatically create only rectangular segments from a mesh?

Thanks

I have a bit of a weird bug that I stumbled onto.
The studio that I work at would like to jump to Houdini 21. I've set up all our envs to read all of our olts same as always.
Everything reads in fine. I've I have the verbosity switched on I can see no errors.

In houdini obj level I can drop down nodes as usual. But when i switch to solaris any of our previously created hdas wont read in at all.

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "Tool::TF::lop_tf_env_lightrig::0.0.2", line 2, in <module>
File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.440/houdini/python3.11libs\toolutils.py", line 1492, in new_func
return function(*args, **kwargs)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.440/houdini/python3.11libs\objecttoolutils.py", line 492, in genericTool
node = toolutils.genericTool(scriptargs, nodetypename, nodename,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.440/houdini/python3.11libs\toolutils.py", line 1492, in new_func
return function(*args, **kwargs)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.440/houdini/python3.11libs\toolutils.py", line 1614, in genericTool
(child, newnode) = createNodeInContainer(container, nodetypecategory,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.440/houdini/python3.11libs\toolutils.py", line 1464, in createNodeInContainer
parent = container.createNode(subnettypename, container_name,
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.440/houdini/python3.11libs\houpythonportion\ui.py", line 1158, in decorator
return func(*args, **kwargs)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "C:\PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.440/houdini/python3.11libs\hou.py", line 16668, in createNode
return _hou.Node_createNode(self, node_type_name, node_name, run_init_scripts, load_contents, exact_type_name, force_valid_node_name)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
hou.OperationFailed: The attempted operation failed.
Invalid node name

The weird thing is that i can still drop the node with python, without any issue
hou.node('/stage').createNode('tf_env_lightrig')

The only thing that i can vaguely see in the error message is that its got an extra lop_ in the name in the error
Tool::TF::lop_tf_env_lightrig::0.0.2

Does anyone have anything that could point me in a direction?

As the title suggests, when diving into the vellum solver and adjusting the Pop Axis Force type / parameters I can't seem to find a way to get the proper guide(s) to display.

Unsure if I may have disabled something that may be hiding the guide so I'm hoping some Houdini experts out there may have some insight!

Thanks