Sculpting in Houdini, this is not necessary; what is necessary is the expansion of KineFX by means of Character Animation tools etc which we are already seeing. As for FX, I believe SideFX is on that road very well so it knows what it needs to improve on, certainty Houdini doesn't need to become like Blender that is a wrong path to follow.

As with rendering, I have used Mantra; although not in a while I use to be very effective in Mental Ray I decided to make Octane my render of choice over the rest it's the off ramp from the technical back to creative process when it comes to rendering. Therefore I can't speak on Karma other then I've read it still has issues and doesn't seem as polished as Mantra was, that is just an opinion and how I see it from others who use it.

There are plenty of renders that exist that if you feel as if Karma just isn't giving you the results you want, choose another render that is dedicated to rendering and learn it.

Looks like I discovered XPU's Achilles' heel, it isn't able to manage the GPU memory the same as Arnold, I used a scene with around 97 MaterialX materials, 41 of these have 4x 2k textures which were created with Substance Painter and the Dome light has a 16k hdri on it, Karma XPU cannot render the scene with the GPU's, it only uses the CPU in XPU mode, but Arnold has no problem rendering the scene, because of this XPU takes 15 mins where Arnold takes just over a min to render. I really hope you guys can get this sorted in H20 as now I have to go back to Arnold for now.

Are you able to describe the scene to us at all?
eg
- just lots of textures + geo?
- perhaps lots of instancing?
- curve-heavy?

If rendering in the viewport, you can open the render-stats on screen
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/karma_xpu.html#howto [www.sidefx.com]

The memory report for the GPU will contain its last known state before running out of memory and can inform us of what it was that blew out the memory.

If texture-heavy, you could try and clamp textures to 1k
export KARMA_XPU_MAX_TEXTURE_RES=1024
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/karma_xpu.html#textures [www.sidefx.com]

GDay Brians, The scene is basically a vehicle (Car) with the bonnet up exposing all the engine and running gear, all the details you would expect of a car with the bonnet up are there, there are lots of geometry for the running gear which all contains textures, there are 41 MaterialX materials each containing 4 textures (colour, roughness, metallic and height for the normal), no curves or instancing, if I clamp the textures to 1k then the Dome light hdri is too low resolution to be usable. The viewport is set through karma settings at default (720) using XPU at 5 samples, just for quick feedback, but even with these low settings the render only uses 1 GPU with the CPU and errors the second GPU (The system has 2x rtx2080ti cards). It is because of the number of textures I have on the running gear, if I hide some of the engine geometry the scene will render fine.

Are both GPUs the same spec? I'm curious as to why one would fail but the other work fine.
What do the memory stats look like in the viewport? Are they similar on both GPUs?

The Houdini OpenGL viewport might be filling up one of the GPUs with its own copy of the textures + geo

Hi Brians, yep, both GPU's are exactly the same, I set the environment variable KARMA_XPU_MAX_TEXTURE_RES to 1024 and it renders as you would expect with XPU on both GPU's, but the Dome light HDRI is also set to 1K which renders very blurred and low res.
After a few more test renders, it appears that the Dome HDRI is what needs the resolution set so high, I set the KARMA_XPU_MAX_TEXTURE_RES to 4096 which renders on both GPU's most of the time, but sometimes just on one, the Dome light Environment HDRI is still blurred, but it's not noticeable as the close up shots under bonnet is expected to have an out of focus background.

Perhaps I should exclude domelight textures from any form of resolution clamping?
Or perhaps have a secondary environment variable (for sanity) set to 8k (or something)?

That would be fantastic, a clamp for the Dome light and another for the Materials.

Stephen Davidson
HOUDINI TO ZBRUSH (Much more than GoZ)
An advanced Houdini to ZBrush workflow. leverage Houdini for it's strengths in proceduralism, object and asset management, object versions, posing models with KineFX,and leverage ZBrush for its sculpting tools. A FACS workflow and ability to sculpt animated models. It would make it possible to create a Houdini scene for exporting displacement maps using Houdini instead of ZBrush, which is more production friendly. Houdini would carry everything and only fingers ZBrush's brain for sculpting. (I cant tell you how frustrating ZBrush is in production, particularly when working on assets between artists and particularly in ensuring standards when exporting displacements). Bringing most of that work to Houdini will make it manageable in a studio environment.

No idea if this is doable but it would be nice if creased edges/data from Zbrush could get exported as crease data in Houdini 20.

I really hope Houdinid to get some sculpting and painting ability. Especially sculpting. I understand it'll never catch Zbrush or even Blender in terms of sculpting, but when making corrective blend shapes, importing/exporting between Houdini and Blender is really no solution. That severely limits the use of KineFX to me.

As a game dev, a customizable real-time viewport shading system will be tremendously helpful as well. But I know the chance that Houdini gets it is less than zero.

At least some sculpting, please?

Speaking of H20… how much longer do we have to wait SideFX? :-)

I would love to see those 2 tiny tiny add-ons on UI ^_^

1) Really love the karma/solaris workflow so I hope the Karma CPU and XPU will be released in production mode (for example light & shadows linker working in xpu).
2) efficient COPs

I love the new Karma XPU renderer, but I hate the fact that every time I want to edit the geometry in any way, the viewport switches out of the Karma render view and you have to get back to the Karma render view after you have edited or moved the geometry, I know that you can do the transformations in Solaris, but I like to do old school, but I suppose I could just use the Karma rop instead.

My kingdom for a hotkey in MPlay that mirrors/flips the canvas left and right...

🎡Systems

• Revamped Substance Designer like COPs + Real-time Compositor Viewport
  
• Develop your own equivalent file format to .SBSAR to generate textures, layer them with mtlx and embed everything into a USD file.
  
• Karma Baker with auto setups values using intersection analysis between the LP and HP and automatic adaptive cages
  
• High level mtlx and COP nodes
  
• Start building a more extensive noise library for mtlx, cops and heightfields as we will need them to create materials. Afterwards, start building a smart materials and generators library.
  
• Sculpting basics (you don't need to be the best). I don't care if it's an all-in-one node or a suite of nodes. I'm dying for VDB>sculpt>quadremesh. Aren't you?
  
• More appealing direct modeling. There is too much friction between the user and the viewport.
  
• Shortcut Concatenation (blender) would be a good idea to reduce friction. eg:typing in the viewport g+x+value(move+axis_constraint+amount) or R+R to rotate with the trackball.
  
• More snapping presets for the pie menu would also help improve the modeling mode.
  
• Interactive flag (maybe replacing the not so used frozen flag), Why?, (1) to know a node has an interactive mode and which ones do not.(2) to indicate that you are currently in the interactive mode of that node. (3) to avoid the need to lift your hand to press Enter or Escape. (4) sense of control.
  
• Holding alt+mmb while orbiting to snap to different orthographic views (plasticity). Or even better, 'snap to closest orthographic view', which allows you to map all planes to one key (MODO)
  
• Symmetry selections and select similar.
  
• Group aliases. eg: select ring, fill selection, select from relative bbox (from top/mid/bot), select line (which is a select loop but smarter enough to stop at corners)...
  
• More appealing subd modeling. Idk why but setting the render flag on the subd node while templating the unsubdivided geo isn't comfortable. Maybe an interactive mode in the subd node to edit the "cage" would do the trick.
  
• Specific nodes to wrap and encourage the use of SDF modeling and kitbashing
  
• Convert to nurbs > bevel > convert back to poly. To steal the most envied feature of softwares like Plasticity (which is the NURBS beveling).
  
• Kill OBJ level in favor of LOPs.
  
• Further expand the component builder workflow
  
• Kill Mantra in favor of Karma.
  
• Try to end redshift's hegemony in favor of materialx. They got a huge point now that their mats can be exported to unreal as well.
  
• ML ROM to train flesh simulations.
  
• ML and GPU Multithreading Powered Solvers
  
• Better Erosion node to catch the gaea one
  
• Cascadeur like Physics anim.
  
• Vulkan viewport.
  
• Scales tools like the hda from Wout Tengrootenhuysen
  
• Clothing tools for mimicking the most common workflows of Marvelous Designer and help with garment creation.
  
• Continue bringing valuable things hidden in networks to SOP level. Blender users are using VOPs in SOPs without even realizing it. That's the key, make people use it without telling them they are using it. A lot of hidden gems aren't used simply because they are buried. Maybe geeks like that, but it's not reasonable, accessible, intuitive, or user-friendly at all. Constraint Relationships for mechanical stuff is a good example of what I'm not using because it's out of scope. Another example is to use a simple geometry CHOP you have to create a CHOPnet, a channel node, dive inside, use a Geometry (specify the path) and then use the actual node (...) 4 nodes and one lvl down to do a noise filter... so, bring geometry CHOPs into SOPs for straightforward use.
  
• Refurbish hidden features and bring them back to life as if they were brand new. Help users rediscover these valuable tools that have been neglected or overlooked.
  
• Get rid of redundant nodes (clean the house, tidy up your room, throw away the old furniture). eg: getting rid of all the "cache" nodes and make an unified one which works for all cases.
  
• USD Cache SOP like the hda from Ayman Abolila
  
• Watertight Collision (like the hda from attila sipos). In fact, that's the output you would expect from the collision source node.
  
• Better particle fluid surface node, the result of the actual one is very poor. I always see people coming up with some workaround because the output of this node is not what they expect.
  
• More aliases, including presets for point and group expressions and other wrangle snippets. Also, list them somewhere pls, either in the docs or by pressing tab and typing "aliases". Aliases were a great introduction to avoid the creation and maintenance of new nodes that do not deserve a node by themselves.
  
• Straightforward Lattice node, the current one requires many nodes to make it work and is not that good after all.
  
• Limit Bevel (plasticity)
  
• Wrap Face and Unwrap Face SOP (plasticity)
  
• Art-directable point velocity SOP like the BoomBox hda from Jason Harmon
  
• Add an option in the boolean node to enable infinite slicing with the ability to choose whether or not to affect backfaces, eliminating the need to thicken the cutting shape beforehand. That way, we can replicate the imprint curve tool from plasticity by setting the operation to 'shatter'.
  
• Expand Match Size capabilities to unrotate and align to components like the 'align to component' shelf tool, right now feels like match size only does half of the job.
  
• Multiple outputs split node, so that we can split as many items as we need, instead of being limited to two.
  
• Add the whitewater nodes to the new FLIP suite.
  
• Bring Crowd Solver to SOP lvl.
  
• The trigger node for crowds is fantastic, just like the ones in game engines, thanks to its overridable functions. It's a shame that it is crowds specific only. I would like you to bring it to the surface for triggering events in other workflows as well.
  
• Upgrade the tree tools to match or exceed the quality of Nils Westfelt's Simple Tree Tools
  
• Make a fine selection of the best nodes from third party libraries like Ql, AE, EZ, MOPs and make your own take. People hate relying on addons, and that's one of Houdini's strengths, a virtue that must be nurtured and improved whenever possible, as it sets it apart from the competition, which handles this matter poorly.
  
• Adding a tangentu attr with a polyframe set to Style=MikkT speeds up the bonedeform like 500%. There is also an HDA called "Wrap Deformer" from Momme which leads to better results than the official point deform node. And the rest node from QL also works better. Since these nodes work together frequently and there is significant room for improvement, it would be a good reason to upgrade their current version.
  
• Better Niagara_ROP, mtlx to Substrata_ROP, ControlRig_ROP, GeometryCollection_ROP, Crowds to MassEntity_ROP, PCG_ROP instead HDAs? (In fact, it would be even better if you can address all of this with USD)
  

🧰Misc

• The groups widget is kind of annoying. It should be great to visualize groups through the info panel by clicking on the group name, just like you do with attrs.
  
• In the info panel, add support to quickly change the attr visualization type (float grayscale, vector, str...) just by pressing rmb over the attr names.
  
• rmb/assign shortcut... for nodes, options, ui buttons and window tabs (plasticity)
  
• Drag and drop nodes to pie menus to simple replace or assign nodes to empty or occupied slots. Same thing on new empty windows to drag and drop nodes and make your own tool palettes to be used as pop-ups binding them to a shortcut (rmb/assign shortcut... on its header)
  
• Fix redirections/dependencies script
  
• An option to stop nodes that are taking too long to cook in order to prevent crashes.
  
• Focus on elements when double-clicking them in the spreadsheet (unreal PCG).
  
• Support drag and drop in the spreadsheet to drag the attr names or values and drop them into any param field
  
• Good looking gizmos
  
• Add a compute range button to all fit parameters (not all of them has it)
  
• Be able to set the render flag in materialx and VOPs nodes.
  
• Icons for high level mtlx nodes but leaving the low level ones without it
  
• Do you know when you have to set the resolution in a pyro/flip parameter and link it to every other resolution parameter? pls, save us from that redundancy somehow, so we can just set it once and pass it through.
  
• Provide some kind of visual feedback for parameters that differ from their default values
  
• An option to normalize all Vellum parameters to 0-1 range, for those who don't want to deal with parameters that operate in unknown ranges of millions of decimals. I know this sounds very stupid but for newcomers it would be like setting a game from hell to chicken. I would use it to reduce my obsession with continuously testing parameters, to be honest.
  
• Solaris to TOPs tutorial serie
  
• Houdini Foundations book H20 version
  

🧪R&D

• Develop some way of creating USD-HDAs with the ability to contain a procedural materialx which adapts to the geometry changes in real time when used in game engines. Maybe only possible in unreal engine new substrata real-time BSDF system.
  
• AI-powered nodes (starting for Auto UV and Capture Biharmonic)... Also similar nodes to Runway or Adobe Firefly like "color grade from prompt", "color grade from reference", "tracking from target", "automatic subject masking", "image2material", "color ramp from prompt", "AI image to svg". These could perfectly be Houdini nodes.
  
• AI Accelerated karma
  
• Real Time VFX (experimental)
  
• Procedural Parametric Modeling (experimental). Once someone in the world develops such a thing, even AI will have a hard time surpassing it. Furthermore, parametric modeling is less destructive than polygonal, minimizes manual tweaking which is closer to houdini's idea. However, it is the combination of both that could help overcome Houdini's modeling struggles.
  
• Neural VDBs
  
• Neural Physics
  
• AI Material Super-resolution
  
• COPs SDF editor
  
• Release project Dryad and Vitruvio
  
• GPT powered layout and set dressing (omniverse)
  
• GPT powered documentation, including Houdini Engine Doc in the same site
  
• Copilot wrangle and python nodes with option for user feedback to refine the model.
  

💌Some Nice Words
Don't rush to release this update. Take as much time as you need to make it as impactful, disruptive, loud and groundbreaking as possible, so that it shakes up the industry and claim your throne as industry standard. If you have to delay it 1, 2, 3 months, fuck people really.
...
"I never saved anything for the swim back" Gattaca (1997)

nicholasralabate
My kingdom for a hotkey in MPlay that mirrors/flips the canvas left and right...

in 19.5 and onwards 'o' is the hotkey for flipping left and right in mplay

Carlos_Rivadulla
-Revamped Substance Designer like COPs. Packing an MTLX within an USD-HDA has a lot of potential.
-Sculpting basics (you don't need to be the best). I don't care if it's an all-in-one node or a suite of nodes. I'm dying for grid remeshins>sculpting>quadremeshing. Aren't you?
-More appealing direct modeling.There is too much friction between the user and the viewport.
-More appealing subd modeling.
-Kill OBJ level in favor of LOPs.
-Kill Mantra in favor of Karma.
-try to end redshift's hegemony in favor of materialx
-GPU Multithreading pyro solver.
-cascadeur like Physics anim.
-Vulkan viewport.
-Continue bringing valuable things hidden in networks to SOP level. Blender users are using VOPs in SOPs, and they don't even know it. That's the key, make people use it without telling them they are using it. There are a lot of things that are not used simply because they are hidden. Maybe geeks like that, but it's not reasonable, accessible, intuitive, or user-friendly at all. Constraint Relationships for mechanical stuff is a good example of what I'm not using because it's out of scope. Another example is to use a simple geometry CHOP you have to create a CHOPnet, a channel node, dive inside, use a Geometry (specify the path) and then use the actual node (...) 4 nodes and one lvl down to do a noise filter really?.
-Get rid of redundant nodes (clean the house, tidy up your room, throw away the old furniture)
-Add the whitewater nodes to the new FLIP suite.
-A shortcut like R+R in Blender to rotate with the trackball should be great to have. Especially when rotating bones. Typing in the viewport like g+x+value (move+axis_constraint+amount) is also a good idea to reduce friction.
-Symmetry selections and select similar.
-The groups widget is kind of annoying. It should be great to visualize groups through the info panel by clicking on the group name, just like you do with attrs.

Dreaming is free section
-AI-powered nodes (starting with Auto UV as an experimental field). Similar to Runway tools "color grade from prompt", "color grade from reference", "auto-tracking from target". They have 30 one-click tools that could perfectly be Houdini nodes.
-Neural VDBs
-AI Accelerated karma
-Convert to nurbs > bevel > convert back to poly. To leverage the most envied feature of software like Plasticity (which is the NURBS beveling).

Some Nice Words
Don't rush to release this update. Take as much time as you need to make it as impactful, disruptive, loud and groundbreaking as possible, so that it shakes up the industry and claim your throne as industry standard. If you have to delay it 1,2,3 months, fuck people really.
...
"I never saved anything for the swim back" Gattaca (1997)

These are my hopes and dreams too! lol
I hope sidefx is listening, I’m doing a lot of non-procedural modeling in houdini atm and the software almost seems like it’s begging me not to do so! the viewport interaction with modeling tools is a hit and miss situation. The node graph sometimes drops edit nodes in weird places in the node graph and totally f’up the model; it’s just way more frustrating than it needs to be! The object level has always been the worst thing about houdini for me and I truly hope I no longer have to use it, my start up currently defaults to stage context.

The houdini openGL view might just be the worst one I’ve use on any 3D software in terms not updating properly; a lot of times I have to close the viewport panel and open a new one to kick in updates, I don’t know if that’s houdini or GPU drivers.

UV tools need to be better!

I’m really looking forward to H20 whenever it comes out! I too hope SESI takes their time and give us a great update!

traileverse

Carlos_Rivadulla
-Revamped Substance Designer like COPs. Packing an MTLX within an USD-HDA has a lot of potential.
-Sculpting basics (you don't need to be the best). I don't care if it's an all-in-one node or a suite of nodes. I'm dying for grid remeshins>sculpting>quadremeshing. Aren't you?
-More appealing direct modeling.There is too much friction between the user and the viewport.
-More appealing subd modeling.
-Kill OBJ level in favor of LOPs.
-Kill Mantra in favor of Karma.
-try to end redshift's hegemony in favor of materialx
-GPU Multithreading pyro solver.
-cascadeur like Physics anim.
-Vulkan viewport.
-Continue bringing valuable things hidden in networks to SOP level. Blender users are using VOPs in SOPs, and they don't even know it. That's the key, make people use it without telling them they are using it. There are a lot of things that are not used simply because they are hidden. Maybe geeks like that, but it's not reasonable, accessible, intuitive, or user-friendly at all. Constraint Relationships for mechanical stuff is a good example of what I'm not using because it's out of scope. Another example is to use a simple geometry CHOP you have to create a CHOPnet, a channel node, dive inside, use a Geometry (specify the path) and then use the actual node (...) 4 nodes and one lvl down to do a noise filter really?.
-Get rid of redundant nodes (clean the house, tidy up your room, throw away the old furniture)
-Add the whitewater nodes to the new FLIP suite.
-A shortcut like R+R in Blender to rotate with the trackball should be great to have. Especially when rotating bones. Typing in the viewport like g+x+value (move+axis_constraint+amount) is also a good idea to reduce friction.
-Symmetry selections and select similar.
-The groups widget is kind of annoying. It should be great to visualize groups through the info panel by clicking on the group name, just like you do with attrs.

Dreaming is free section
-AI-powered nodes (starting with Auto UV as an experimental field). Similar to Runway tools "color grade from prompt", "color grade from reference", "auto-tracking from target". They have 30 one-click tools that could perfectly be Houdini nodes.
-Neural VDBs
-AI Accelerated karma
-Convert to nurbs > bevel > convert back to poly. To leverage the most envied feature of software like Plasticity (which is the NURBS beveling).

Some Nice Words
Don't rush to release this update. Take as much time as you need to make it as impactful, disruptive, loud and groundbreaking as possible, so that it shakes up the industry and claim your throne as industry standard. If you have to delay it 1,2,3 months, fuck people really.
...
"I never saved anything for the swim back" Gattaca (1997)

These are my hopes and dreams too! lol
I hope sidefx is listening, I’m doing a lot of non-procedural modeling in houdini atm and the software almost seems like it’s begging me not to do so! the viewport interaction with modeling tools is a hit and miss situation. The node graph sometimes drops edit nodes in weird places in the node graph and totally f’up the model; it’s just way more frustrating than it needs to be! The object level has always been the worst thing about houdini for me and I truly hope I no longer have to use it, my start up currently defaults to stage context.

The houdini openGL view might just be the worst one I’ve use on any 3D software in terms not updating properly; a lot of times I have to close the viewport panel and open a new one to kick in updates, I don’t know if that’s houdini or GPU drivers.

UV tools need to be better!

I’m really looking forward to H20 whenever it comes out! I too hope SESI takes their time and give us a great update!

I mainly do modeling and then look dev and I can say that Houdini is one of the best, I started with 3D Studio on to Max then Softimage then most of the available 3D softwares like Blender, Lightwave etc before landing on Maya for many years and now Houdini. In my experience the best was Softimage XSI, Maya inherited most of what XSI had, but Houdini is my favourite, sure it needs a bit more functionality with non procedural modeling, but what is there works well.
True, from time to time the viewport needs to be reset and the zoom sometimes goes out of whack and some of the functionality could be more accessible, but I like it.
If Polydraw had a mirror function built in and more of what Edit has, then I would be like a pig in mud.
T.

Tser
I mainly do modeling and then look dev and I can say that Houdini is one of the best, I started with 3D Studio on to Max then Softimage then most of the available 3D softwares like Blender, Lightwave etc before landing on Maya for many years and now Houdini. In my experience the best was Softimage XSI, Maya inherited most of what XSI had, but Houdini is my favourite, sure it needs a bit more functionality with non procedural modeling, but what is there works well.
True, from time to time the viewport needs to be reset and the zoom sometimes goes out of whack and some of the functionality could be more accessible, but I like it.
If Polydraw had a mirror function built in and more of what Edit has, then I would be like a pig in mud.
T.

Yes! Boosted Polydraw node!

My two cents:
Edit SOP functionality in it.
Inset, extrude.
Smooth selected Edge aka Labs Edge Smooth SOP.
Drop primitives.