We're exploring Solaris and are curious how people are using it on the farm? Is there a command line method for rendering .USD files directly? Ideally w/out consuming an hbatch license?

Normally we'd dump out a sequence of .vrscene or .rib files out of Houdini to render on the farm w/ VRay or Renderman, but there's no such export out of Solaris, just .USD.

We're exploring using hdPrman to render them directly as well but thought I'd ask in the meantime.

Figured I'd answer my own question for posterity.

Seems like building USD to get usdrecord [graphics.pixar.com] allows you to then run a command like this:


Feel free to share if there's a better workflow.

You can use the SideFX-supplied huskcommand-line tool. It's more suited for the job than usdrecord. I don't believe it checks out a batch/engine license.

Oh nice, thanks Jason Husk command for anyone curious:


The next snag: despite setting verbosity as high as it will go in both the renderer and husk args, I get no progress printing; husk renders correctly, but just sits at 0% for a while then spits out the image.

husk's verbosity relies on the ability to communicate to the render delegate via. the render stats. If the delegate doesn't provide render stats, progress can't be reported.

Thanks Mark, bugged to the Renderman forums:
https://renderman.pixar.com/forum/showthread.php?s=&threadid=43652 [renderman.pixar.com]

We'll see how it shakes out, we can live w/out progress for testing but once we're rendering hour long frames it'll be pretty mandatory

Checkpointing lets you at least see the visible progress. But it's likely more useful to have progress statistics during render.

If you missed the `–checkpoint` argument, you can still trigger a checkpoint save by sending husk a -USR1 signal.

Thanks Mark, the –checkpoint option at least lets you know it's still rendering but doesn't give much of a sense of progress without manually opening the output_part.exr images. BTW, any way to control the naming on those? Ideally we'd just want them writing to output.exr. Hopefully they can do an update on the Renderman side to push out render stats.