David Pekarek

Hi, i have noticed Merge SOP in Houdini 20 behaves differently than in Houdini 19:
If you merge multiple inputs that have the same detail attribute (same name), in H19 you end up with an array of all incoming values. In H20 only first value is retained, and the rest is discarded.
This is well illustrated if you merge multiple Alembic SOPs with "abcFileName" detail string attrib enabled.
I know this can be worked around with intrinsics, but currently it's breaking some of my older setups. Is this intentional, or is it a bug? I'm on 20.0.590, before I was using 19.0.720.
thanks, D.

jsmack
Workflow-wise, the layout department might want to publish new cameras with a different back plate (at working resolution) for the team to use rather than hacking something based on the integration camera on a user by user basis.

depends on type of projects i guess. what you say may be fine for long form productions where time budget is counted in months. In commercials and music videos, turnarounds can be obviously very short. Sometimes you get client notes literally hours before the final delivery, and it is vital to be able to cut corners anywhere possible. Pulling new set of plates and cameras, and updating everything "by the book" is simply out of the question when you need to deliver updated renders in 40 mins. Hacking your way through is the only way how to make it. And that's why we love Houdini - you can hack the sh*t out of it

Alright, that's a good point. I haven't even tried rendering to disk, as I was stuck and confused by it's weird behaviour. I would say it was giving me unexpected results in mplay as well, but I cannot be sure now. I was also making tests in both H19.0 (production verion) and H20.0, where some things have changed a bit, which probably did not help me to figure it out.

As for decoupled aspect ratio and resolution parms, I guess it is just about getting used to it, and I can see it is already expression linked in H20.