Dan Lee

BrianHanke
I just revisited this in Houdini 21 and the situation with Karma is slightly worse. XPU now locks textures too and no amount of updating textures or restarting renders does anything.

It's not a Solaris thing. RenderMan 27 works great: no file lock, change your texture, click restart and the render instantly updates to the latest version.

We did find a file lock bug relating to non-RAT textures on CPU on Windows, but otherwise unable to reproduce the problem in any other combinations.
Can you please file a bug, including your platform, texture format, and a reproducible case if you have one. Thanks.

I would recommend using the latest daily or production build - 522 is a bit outdated and there were a couple displacement shading related bug fixes since then.

Hi. It's hard to say without an example file, but normal maps typically do require UVs (especially if textured). If you're using height to normal VOP to apply procedural noise as bump, UVs aren't required since the tangent frame between height to normal and normal map nodes are consistent. If you're wiring 3d noise directly into normal map node, then discontinuity artifacts and other issues are expected.