I see the "Storm" option in Solaris and from what I can tell it's Pixar's OpenGL Hydra delegate. It doesn't seem to work though. Cameras don't quite work, textures don't quite work (even using Pxr shaders), dome lights don't work, etc. Just curious what's up. Seems like since it's included by default it must be useful for something.

It is Pixar's Open GL Hydra delegate (Storm is what Pixar calls it too - we didn't just make that up). We build it with the USD library and ship it because it is in some sense the "standard" USD render delegate. But we don't vouch for its correctness of any particular capabilities it may or may not have. If you load a USD file into Solaris and display it with Storm, it should look the same as if you load the same USD files into usdview (which uses Storm by default). It's possible that we don't enable all the bells and whistles that Storm is capable of, but I would expect materials and looking through a camera to behave the same in Solaris and usdview. If there is some discrepancy please submit a bug report.

Storm used to work decently in Solaris but somewhere along the way its interpretation of cameras got seriously screwed up and I just haven't have time to file a bug report for it. Maybe someone else has?

Thanks for the info. There definitely seem to be some things that aren't working, so I'll file a report in a bit with a summary.

Tim, yep cameras get super whacked out in Storm.

When looking through a camera in 18.5, the camera path is sent to the delegate and it generates the view and projection matrices. Prior to 18.5, we simply sent a view and projection matrix to the delegate instead of the camera path. If you disable "Camera Effects" in the Camera menu, Houdini will send the view and projection matrices to the delegate directly. So you may be able to fix Storm with that option (though it'll affect all other render delegates too, so unless you're using Storm all the time it may not be worth it).

If this does fix the problem, the issue lies within Storm.

malexander
So you may be able to fix Storm with that option

Just checked, it made for a modest improvement but still not correct.