Hi. Although Maya does have Xgen etc, I gave up on that years ago when it stopped being developed. Its good until you hit a dead end that you cannot get yourself out of. When I look at things in Houdini now I would say, direct modelling. I know it's not really a Houdini thing. But so much of when you rig and animate relies on being able to model fixes to things. FACS facial setups often need quick modelling fixes even if you have made the shapes in Zbrush to begin with etc.
Maya's sculpting tools that were taken from Mudbox are super useful. The other thing Maya has that is great is the modelling toolbox. I know they bought that from someone else and added it in. But it is very easy to just use this part of Maya for modelling and kind of ignore other parts (for beginners).
The biggest easy win I would say for SideFX is just copy Maya's viewport navigation. Spinning on objects in Maya just works. With Houdini I have played with the prefs but I still get my camera flying off sometimes.
The other easy win is "industry standard" Maya keyboard shortcuts for move rotate and scale. Lots of other 3D programs have to option to use the Maya standard ways of navigation and Xforms.
Im saying this as I know Sidefx are looking at animation with KineFX. So at some point modelling will need to improve.
My 2C.
Best
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Houdini Lounge » What holds yourself/studio from adopting Houdini more?
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Solaris and Karma » Karma UV Pass
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Houdini Lounge » Apple Silicon native renderer plugins?
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Hi. Yes I am slightly playing Devils advocate. It will be interesting long term to see what happens with vulcan. We use windows at work rarher than Linux purely because of Adobe, Macs for us are out of our price range. We are also in no rush to move to windows 11 for years. If it ant broke, don't fix it. For our courses that do run on macs it is going to be at least 5 years before anything is upgraded. Maybe by then more software will be up and running. Best
Houdini Lounge » Apple Silicon native renderer plugins?
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Hi. Flipping the debate around. How much further would blender be if they had taken the resources of a mac port and put that time into the core program. We are going to move back to maya for direct modelling having taught 100+ students blender. Blender was good, but two years later yes we have more os support, but very not enough direct modelling improvements to justify using it. Best
Solaris and Karma » Camera Projections in Karma
- Mark Wallman
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Solaris and Karma » Camera Projections in Karma
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Solaris and Karma » Camera Projections in Karma
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Solaris and Karma » MaterialX online library
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Houdini Lounge » is it possible to layer or mix shaders in karma XPU ?
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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It does make me wonder what renderman are planning with their LAMA MatX shaders and gpu rendering. Assuming LAMA will eventually work on GPU, will layers and mix nodes work in their case or not. Best
Solaris and Karma » Vector blur AOV from Karma
- Mark Wallman
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Hi. Would anyone know how to make a vector blur AOV/LPE in Karma for post motion blur in Nuke? Best Mark
Edited by Mark Wallman - 2022年1月14日 10:17:25
Solaris and Karma » Exporting out as MaterialX
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Hi all. I just came across this which may help...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpShFmwjMzg [www.youtube.com]
Best. Mark
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpShFmwjMzg [www.youtube.com]
Best. Mark
Solaris and Karma » MaterialX online library
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Solaris and Karma » MaterialX online library
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Oh dear. There was me hoping materialX would work through different apps. I hope these are just issues because it is so new best
Solaris and Karma » MaterialX online library
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
- Online
Hi.
I just came across AMD's online library to download/upload MaterialX materials.
https://matlib.gpuopen.com/main/materials/all?category=Plaster [matlib.gpuopen.com]
Best
Mark
I just came across AMD's online library to download/upload MaterialX materials.
https://matlib.gpuopen.com/main/materials/all?category=Plaster [matlib.gpuopen.com]
Best
Mark
Solaris and Karma » Exporting out as MaterialX
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
- Online
Hi. Woudl anyone know how to export materialX subnets out as a Material X shader?
Best
Mark
Best
Mark
Technical Discussion » Solaris: how to auto read Z up usd files to flip them to Y
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
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Hi
OK folks. It seems like the nice people at Nvidia have branched Blender and have a much better version of the USD exporter that can flip Y or Z up. It is in the free nVidia Omniverse Launcher.
Best
OK folks. It seems like the nice people at Nvidia have branched Blender and have a much better version of the USD exporter that can flip Y or Z up. It is in the free nVidia Omniverse Launcher.
Best
Technical Discussion » Solaris: how to auto read Z up usd files to flip them to Y
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
- Online
Hi. Without starting any flame wars about which is the correct up Z or Y. I am trying to export moving geometry cached as usd from Blender 3.0. If I transform the geo to be Y up it looks correct until you render with motion blur which seems 45 degrees off. I do need to do more testing however. The Blender community's general response is everyone else should just be Z up.
So Looking at the Nvida Attic demo which is Z up https://developer.nvidia.com/usd [developer.nvidia.com] I can save it out again from Solaris as a rather large usda file and I can see it is Z up..
defaultPrim = "Root"
doc = """Generated from Composed Stage of root layer
"""
endTimeCode = 1
metersPerUnit = 0.009999999776482582
startTimeCode = 1
upAxis = "Z"
)
So what I am wondering is. Is there anyway Solaris can read the Z/Y up data and auto correct to Solaris's stage. Some kind of "read up axis and compensate" option.?
Best
So Looking at the Nvida Attic demo which is Z up https://developer.nvidia.com/usd [developer.nvidia.com] I can save it out again from Solaris as a rather large usda file and I can see it is Z up..
defaultPrim = "Root"
doc = """Generated from Composed Stage of root layer
"""
endTimeCode = 1
metersPerUnit = 0.009999999776482582
startTimeCode = 1
upAxis = "Z"
)
So what I am wondering is. Is there anyway Solaris can read the Z/Y up data and auto correct to Solaris's stage. Some kind of "read up axis and compensate" option.?
Best
Technical Discussion » Renderfarm issues with Karma / USD - Houdini 18.5.633
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
- Online
Hi. Martin. Just another thought. Do you have any cache lops in there. Try disabling them if there are. Best mark
Technical Discussion » Shadow Matte
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
- Online
Hi Npetit. This is much better. I know I have a ticket with you. I will try to mock up my examples and send them over to you next week. One thing I should mention is in my custom reflection pass I am outputting direct reflection and indirect reflection. Dome light HDR's show up in the direct and reflections of the characters/objects show up in the indirect. The main one I am using is indirect reflection.
Best
Mark
Best
Mark
Edited by Mark Wallman - 2021年11月25日 05:33:08
Technical Discussion » Need Help Getting Maya USD into Houdini 19 (UVs)
- Mark Wallman
- 644 posts
- Online
Hi.
I did flag some of these issues over in the Maya beta forum about 6 months ago but for what ever reason the Maya Dev team are not always that responsive. I actually ended up making a tool in Houdini to convert ABC files for use in Houdini, unreal, multiverse and Blender.
The USD Multiverse guys do have a slack forum where you could ask about the issues with Mac OS.
Best
Mark
I did flag some of these issues over in the Maya beta forum about 6 months ago but for what ever reason the Maya Dev team are not always that responsive. I actually ended up making a tool in Houdini to convert ABC files for use in Houdini, unreal, multiverse and Blender.
The USD Multiverse guys do have a slack forum where you could ask about the issues with Mac OS.
Best
Mark
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