Charles Trippe

It would actually be really nice if a VCM-style integrator to sample Specular->Diffuse->Specular paths (like Renderman currently does) was on the horizon for Karma, since it handles these types of scenarios very efficiently.

In any situation where you need to have deformation motion blur, and the geometry changes between frames, you can usually modify the the geo so the topology remains consistent from shutter-open to shutter-close (typically 0.25 to +0.25 from center-frame). Assuming the geometry has some kind of consistent ID across the frame, I typically just use a timeshift with a round($FF)-0.25 to grab the geo at shutter open, and then attribcopy the from the true interpolated position (matching by id) any points that end up deleted mid-frame just remain at the shutter-open position (which is typically acceptable, though you can make it hold to the last-sampled mid-frame position too if you use a for loop with termination).

I've used this on many shows requiring highly non-linear motion on particle systems.

I can't stand the new loops in VOPs. It feels much more awkward to work with and I can't do simple things like associate floating node sets with a loop block without having to connect it to an input.

I wish they at least kept the old way of doing things. I feel like I keep having to do stupid stuff to make Houdini happy than working the way I want to.