Peter Nunez

Here is a render I did with the sampling set to .25. I did a few variations including the export settings.
This maybe is the result that was found with the resample tranforms LOP?

Open to any other ideas

cheers!
~p

pixelninja
From what I can see there's not enough samples. If you turn on "Enable playback at fractional frames" you can actually see the wheels collapsing in the viewport.
The simple solution is to increase the amount of samples by lowering the increment (of the start/end/inc parameter) of the export.
Here's a reference flipbook comparing caching at 1, 0.5 and 0.25.

The "Resample Transforms" LOP I think is meant to correct issues like this without having to cache with more steps but it didn't work here for some reason (it made the wheels go haywire). I'll submit a bug report.

Some other unrelated improvements I would suggest:
- Set "Packed primitives" to "Create Xforms" so you don't end up with a bunch of unneeded prototype primitives
- Set "Topology Attributes" to "Static" (assuming there's no mesh deformation)
- Set "Set Default Values" to "* ^transform" (assuming your attributes are static)

Those options give you a cleaner tree and won't cache your attributes for every timestep. Your current setup caches not only your transforms but also the mesh, normals, uvs, etc for every single timestep, which is wasteful.
Personally, I recommend caching from LOPs rather than SOPs so that you can curate your scene graph tree and troubleshoot any USD issues before caching.

Hope that helps!

Wow this is great input!
Thanks for taking the time to investigate and show your findings with reference. Pretty new to going full production in Houdini so I appreciate the time and effort.
cheers!
~p

Here is a condensed scene of the issue I'm still seeing.

There is a small usd export and a small camera cache that needs to be saved to see the issue.

Seems like something is happening in the rbd path follow that is affecting the moblur in solaris to cause the shrinking.
I've run a couple tests just using regular transforms for rotations in mesh and packed primitives and those seem to work fine.

Any insight would be appreciated.

cheers~
~p