Mathias Bjerre

I've been working with solaris for a couple of months now, and have produced some tests and shots with the new workflow I'm happy with.

However I keep running into the same issues as most other in here, with regards to the layout lop. It's a brilliant tool that makes set-dressing a breeze like never before, however as many other forum posts have written about, your entire houdini has a high risk of suddenly freezing when you re-interact with the layout LOP after having placed some initial assets.

I keep reading the release notes and have noticed in 19.5.639 that there's some new changes to the layout lop -
specifically ---
--
Fixed a number of issues when using the Layout LOP to edit an existing point instancer. This workflow should now behave properly, though as before, if the point instancer is changed upstream, the downstream Layout LOP won't adopt these changes unless you "Reset Changes" to reinitialize the Layout LOP, which loses all work done so far.


Not sure if it helps in my case, I find the layout lop crashing just as often when the usd assets are set up either as point instances or as instanceable references..

I am however unable to check out these fixes myself as redshift has yet to update its renderer to accept versions of houdini newer than 19.5.605

Has anybody had the chance to try out the layout lop in this new version - is it still unstable? I don't mind that some of the layout LOP brushes are a bit buggy - i can live with that - but it becomes un-workable due to the amount of crashes.

If anybody has tried the new version of houdini out, I'd appreciate to hear your thoughts, otherwise, has anybody found any semi-solid method of working with the layout lop ? (the way you structure your scene in solaris might have an effect? I've tried different things out without striking a pattern I can work with without crashes sadly)

It's hard to go back to set-dressing old-school once you've tried the layout lop lmao I really wish it was a little more stable

I'm seeking a solution for a recurring issue in my Solaris workflow. Each time I launch the program, it defaults to my C:/ Houdini installation folder in the Asset Gallery instead of my custom database.

I'm wondering if it's possible to set Houdini to automatically target a specific folder-path, perhaps using #env or a similar feature. This would eliminate the manual step of switching the default database to my custom one each time I start up the program.

Does anyone have advice on how to achieve this? I'd appreciate any insights you could share.

I just wanna add that it's a problem for very very specific cases, cause the materialX displays well in the GL, however sometimes it doesn't, I've encountered bugs when I use opacity maps in my shaders for example, so in those cases just having a USD shader at hand is very nice - so for now I guess it's just easier to avoid using opacity map parameters in combination with triplanar