syncronos_design

I've been able to get the environment volume working using an Atmosphere Shader on the Render Settings LOP. Attached are some samples if that's helpful. (I haven't tried it yet as a volume object, however.)

Our studio is currently evaluating Solaris (loving it so far), but there are a few things we're wondering about, and would be curious to get others' experience or advice using it for shot layout (sets, props, characters, etc).

Ideally we'd love to bring everything in via a Stage Manager lop, then use an Edit lop to arrange it all into a master layout. The concern with this approach is that the Edit lop is a "black box", meaning there appears to be no way to fix or update a prim or path should something need to be changed, or if a path is broken. Just as a very simple example, if the artist who is setting up the file makes a typo and names an asset incorrectly, there's no way to rename it without breaking the Edit lop. Comparatively, dropping down a Transform lop instead is easy to fix, but would result in dozens, if not hundreds, of nodes for a complex shot. The Stage Manager lop itself can do transforms, which is nice because each change is accessible as an "edit" tab, but it seems to lack some of the flexibility of the actual Edit lop (specifically the Edit lop has pivot option for transform/centroid, it can target just a single component within a group, and it seems to respond more quickly in the viewport than the Stage Manager, making it feel more interactive).

So out of curiosity, what are other users of Solaris doing for their layout needs? Creating sets and set dressing in another app and just bringing in completed shots as one reference? Using the Stage Manager for master layout? Using Edit/Transforms lops? Or perhaps just doing it all in obj context and bringing it in with a sopimport?

Is there a way to alter the paths or names of objects in the Edit LOP? For example, if I use it to lay out a scene, but then later need to change the name of an object or path, the edits break, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to update it. In other nodes I can access the exact path and/or primitive so can update things without losing my work. I even tried “opchange” but that doesn’t seem to recognize anything in the Edit LOP. For now, the only way seems to be revert the names back to what they were, or to redo all the layout edits.