As usual pure gold from you!

I hope one day I will be able to understand what you did here

Thanks a lot!

Thanks for this, will check these suggestions!

What I need to have is everything to be procedural. As this is going to be HDA in Unity.

Can you provide an example of a desired result?

I want island to be rotated as in world space. So bottom of UV island in 3D needs to be bottom of island in UV space too. Artist apply texture with arrows pointing up. On some parts of geo it is correctly pointing up, on others it is pointing down and others left or right (cause UV islands are randomly rotated). Need all of them to point up. I know I can do it with UV Unwrap, or like Cubic mapping, thing is that artist wants less islands, and less seams. As possible. UV Flatten gives me that, but introduce orientation.

Less advance version of this:

Packmaster [www.blendernation.com]

I use UV Flatten to proceduraly sew UVs, after UV Unwrap. Problem with this is that after flatten, UV islands are being randomly rotated. I need to have them be rotated as in World Space. There is also UV Layout node that has option to Axis Align as in 3D space, but that really does not do much.

Any tips for this?

Help browser still does not work on Linux. Ubuntu 22.04 LTS

Adding QTWEBENGINE_DISABLE_SANDBOX=1 env variable fixed it.

I am creating some HDA for Unity and client needs specific naming of parts when cooked in Unity. Is it possible to somehow fill Output node name using Python or expressions? I see that expressions are not possible to use in name field.

Managed to make it to work.

Did anyone manage to successfully install and use Engine for Unity on Linux?

I am getting this error.

Not sure is it version mismatch or something else.

Using Unity LTS 2021.3.2f1 and Houdini 19.0.589

Can you show us what you get and what you expect? Also in VOP you plugged Blue value into Alpha.

Shouldn't that be Output-sRGB?

CPU only.

It just too much ifs here. You did not publish game yet, but you are already thinking about Houdini license costs …

Who cares… Also more interested in 3delight thanks to Kays And I am using PCs for rendering anyways.

Just because I do not have time at the moment, that is why I ask. Thanks for response, that is great to hear.

I am not saying they are not being used, but that it will not make GPU racks and local render farms redundant. We have been using render farms for years, clouds too, but still have local render farms, GPU racks etc …

If I got 10$ every time I heard, wow there is cloud based rendering, no one will buy high end GPUs, CPUs, workstations, it is not necessary anymore, I could have one more rack of 2080 here ..

I do not agree with this everything is going into cloud. Keep hearing that for couple of years now and still not seeing it. If projects goes huge, which are usually type of projects you need more power for, you have issue with upload and security etc. It is good for small to mid size projects, but than again if you have rack with 8 1080Ti you are already real time, so what is the point? Clouds are not something new …

BTW are there any 3delight videos where I can see it working on more production ready scenes, not simple, test objects?

Midphase does it work with Houdini? On their website I see only Maya and Katana … and Daz…

It is in Beta for Houdini.

I understand that windows are better options when using 3D Software and I have thought about getting Razer blade but I honestly prefer Mac laptops over Windows. As for the workstation, I might get one in the future. Right now I am looking for a laptop cause I'm always on the move.

Complex scenes is relative term. To be honest I would not rely on laptops when doing sims and rendering, especially if they gonna last for several hours. Laptop will thermal throttle for sure. So whatever you buy you will need to accept some compromises.

And you already decided on Mac, than everything depends on how much money you want to spend. If possible buy top one, MBP 16" with max out RAM and CPU.

Yeah, would love to see this!

callie_btw
I actually 100% agree with you on these points. Apple banning these techs was absolutely ridiculous, even though I truly do believe in Metal 2 being the future. Because until that future is here, we as artists still need those techs to do our jobs as efficiently as possible. My hope is that these developers will fully embrace Metal 2 and take advantage of Optimizing these apps for Mac. As an example, due to Maxon acquiring Redshift, and C4D's biggest userbase by far being Mac, Redshift is going to take FULL advantage of the new Mac. I know personally that Apple is handling the majority of writing this for Metal 2 optimization, and as a result, we are going to see the full power of what is capable when these apps are optimized for Apple's new hardware and tool suite.

All of this said, of course it would've been much more pleasant and a much stronger transitional period for Mac users if Apple allowed the older techs to still be supported and fully developed in the Mac environment in the meantime.

Yes, I always assumed that C4D will be first one to support Metal cause of size of their Mac userbase.

Christoph F

goat
Mac was 20-50% slower than Linux
Windows was 20% slower than Linux

what are those numbers based on?
meaning, is this sim time, disk load time, render time mantra, ..? or a combination of all?

Not to start the whole freakin OS discussion myself but Linux was always mentioned to be quickest at a lot of stuff and especially with disk operations. I wonder if this is still the same with ssds or even more so.

I think it is mostly viewport and OpenCL calculations. Houdini is entirely OpenGL app, I think even UI. And problem is that OpenGl and OpenCL and now CUDA are dead techs on OSX. It does not matter what hardware you use. Best GPU on world will not help you there. Especially now when Apple does not support them, neither is willing to do any bug fixes. You have worst experience in Houdini, Blender, MODO, MARI (compared to other OSs) … name it, every app that fully utilize OpenGL, OpenCL or CUDA (which at moment, basically all of them are). Blender for example can not be used for GPU rendering on Catalina, due issues with OpenCL and no CUDA support. Latest MARI for OSX is not updated for almost a year cause they had to work more on Qt and OpenGL which was easy thing to do on Win and Linux. See, all these things can affect you as artist. And this will be case until those apps are ported to Metal, if they ever (I doubt Blender ever will for example). It is really simple as that. We hope situation will change in future but imho it will never be as on Windows or Linux platform, at least you will be limited cause many developers will not find interest into porting to Metal. Those are really facts. Personal insults will not change that.

If you want to stay with OSX than you already answered your own question. Just you have to prepare yourself for wait. Some developers will support Metal directly some will not. No one can give you exact date. Prepare for wait and uncertainty. That is going to be long process (stretched over several years). I had same doubt when trashcan was out, and back than decided to switch to Win/Linux and it proved to be right move. It had great GPUs back than but it was outperformed by 2x cheaper Nvidia cards pretty quickly. Only one render engine was using their full power, and when that engine arrived those card were already outdated. I do not consider switching back to OSX anymore.

If you want to squeeze most $ from your investment, want it right away, PCs are, especially with new Ryzen CPUs, better choice.

All this is related to 3D and Houdini, if you want talk about broadcast industry than you are on wrong forum.