Dan Lee

dlee

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SideFX Staff
Since Sep 2016

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Orthographic-Cylindrical Camera in Karma XPU March 25, 2026, 1:18 p.m.

pixelninja
Fair enough. Good to know it's coming though! Thanks

Is is also planned for XPU to support custom lens scripts in some fashion? Octane can do it with OSL for example.

Nothing to announce at this time.

jsmack
dlee
The builtin cylindrical lens implementation in karma CPU/XPU are... unconventional. It's going to be changed to be orthographic and match mantra behaviour in next major release, but for now, your only option is to use CPU and make a custom lens shader or modify the existing vex script (lens.h).

The current implementation should be kept and renamed though. What type of projection is it? Is it an X-Pan style swinging lens projection? {vertically rectilinear(perspective), horizontally equirectangular(longitudinal)}

Putting a sheet of paper in a coffee can pinhole camera is another type of cylindrical projection, but I think a bit different than the other two.

A Panini projection would be another useful one to have, I think it's also vertically rectilinear but it's horizontally equisolid or some other type of fisheye.

The new implementation will be the same as mantra's (which pretty much looks like https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/lens-shaders-for-gamedev/ [www.sidefx.com] scroll down to "Cylindrical" section).
The current implementation is indeed vertically rectilinear and horizontally longitudinal, but the implementation is deeply flawed (vertical fov forced to 45 degrees, and produces nonsensical results if the image aspect ratio isn't square). We do not believe it's implementation worth keeping.

Orthographic-Cylindrical Camera in Karma XPU March 23, 2026, 6:25 p.m.

Hi. Not at the moment.
The builtin cylindrical lens implementation in karma CPU/XPU are... unconventional. It's going to be changed to be orthographic and match mantra behaviour in next major release, but for now, your only option is to use CPU and make a custom lens shader or modify the existing vex script (lens.h).

Houdini 21 fur rendering issues Jan. 26, 2026, 4:16 p.m.

This will be addressed in the upcoming daily build (21.0.608). Thank you for helping us find the bug.