Tomek P

Tomek P

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Recent Forum Posts

Ambient Occlusion node deprecated, no alternative ? April 24, 2026, 10:32 a.m.

Nicolas Heluani
You can get better AO results from the copernicus bake geometry textures.
Correct me, if I'm wrong, but it requires correct uv coordinates and non-overlapping uv's. Imagine having a huge building. Baking maps might be too expensive, just to have some dust around windows. Other example, you can emit light from ground, when it gets hit by a ball. Baking a sequence of textures and re-baking when animation changes might be a waste of time for such a simple task.
So I'm with racoonart on this - AO node is very usefull. But it should be implemented correctly (with inverted normals, no-self occlusion and self-only ). Mtlxambientocclusion is/was quite limited.

A radial menu for radial menus? Feb. 4, 2026, 12:40 p.m.

How to switch active radial menu programmatically? Feb. 4, 2026, 12:35 p.m.

To get a list of radial menus:
hou.ui.radialMenus()

You can check, which menu is active with:
hou.getPreference('radialmenu.val')

Also you can set it with:
hou.setPreference('radialmenu.val', '2')

But... menu bar doesn't refresh and it updates when I hover cursor over radial menu option. I suppose there's some command to run after setting preferences. I don't know.

One thing to note - I haven't tested this solution properly and I'm not sure if this is the right way to do it. Use it at your own risk.