Daniel Eckstein

I have found that the stage manager for doing things like this in bigger scenes is tough to work with. The layout node is great for things like trees and rocks, but for assets that need a lot of accurate refinement in terms of placement like buildings or lamp posts (man-made), I find that it's too clunky and difficult to use.

What I have found in the current project we are working on is that actually doing the bulk of your placement in the OBJ context with nulls is easier. Giving those nulls Normal attributes in SOPs and then using the names of the nulls to drive a string attribute that, when pulled into an instance in LOPs, can drive an index attribute. Then I bring in the proxy geo from LOPs to SOPs and set up a copy to points as reference for what I am doing with the nulls that matches the instancer in LOPs.

Unfortunately, LOPs doesn't have a light, elegant solution for a lot of these sorts of layout problems that I have found. The Stage Manager and Layout Node are awesome for some things, but for big heavy assets that need tedious refinement, where selecting multiple objects like this, they're not there yet. I'm hoping that there is a nice upgrade coming soon that solves this!

I've run into this problem with a layout node in Houdini 20.0 and Arnold. I have not been able to figure this one out.

Still not sure about this but there is a HDA by Luca Rodiger here:
https://youtu.be/7NFfvk_0E48?si=LJI_qGKe-4xvIbzF [youtu.be]

But it would be great if Cargo imported assets in correctly to Solaris and Karma.