Mark Tucker

The most common thing I've seen leading to this kind of situation is (sometimes unintentional) caching within the LOP network. As an example, we recently got a bug submission where the Motion Blur LOP was causing memory bloat like this. It was an incorrect setting on the Cache LOP inside that HDA, which has now been fixed. So maybe look for Cache LOPs and Cache SOPs (especially ones buried inside HDAs).

Another interesting data point would be to know if you can reproduce without using Karma. This would help localize the problem to either being Karma causing the bloat or LOPs causing the bloat.

Light linker is the right tool for setting up light linking... I'm not totally sure I understand what is wrong/unexpected about the result you're getting, but I'm guessing maybe you're surprised by how dark everything is? My guess is that it's because even objects that aren't lit by the dome light will still block the dome light from illuminating other objects. In which case the right solution might be to set up shadow linking so that none of the objects in your scene cast shadows?

There is a _lot_ of missing information here... Any chance you can supply a hip file showing your Houdini export setup? I don't know anything about Max, Blender, or Unreal import capabilities, but at least with a hip file there is a chance of detecting if something is going wrong on the export side. Thanks!