Chris Rydalch

goldleaf

About Me

Member of R&D team at SideFX, working to improve Solaris and Karma workflows in Houdini. Spent the previous 10+ years in FX, crowds, animation, character fx, and pipeline departments for feature animation.
EXPERTISE
Technical Director
INDUSTRY
Film/TV

Connect

LOCATION
Kansas, United States

Houdini Skills

Availability

Not Specified

My Badges

SideFX Staff
Since Sep 2007
Intern Alumni
2011

My Tutorials

obj-image Beginner
Creating USD Assets with Component Builder
obj-image Quick Tips
Keyframe Functions, Extrapolations, and Box Handles
obj-image Intermediate
IFD Workflow Basics
obj-image Beginner
Mantra Light Instancing Basics

My Talks

obj-image HIVE
What's New in Solaris with Houdini 21
obj-image HIVE
Composing Materials With USD and Solaris
obj-image HIVE
Creating USD Assets with Component Builder

Recent Forum Posts

Adding AOVs to existing mtlx shaders Jan. 15, 2026, 10:56 a.m.

This is not something vanilla MaterialX materials can really do yet; the Karma Material Builder supports this via the Karma AOV VOP (https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/vop/kma_aov-2.0.html), which you connect to the builder's output node; Material Library then sets up the Render Var, and the downstream Karma Render Settings should pick that up, and it should show up in the render.

Editing materials to add AOVs isn't super practical right now; hopefully materials-based AOVs will become more standardized/prevalent/supported in MaterialX/UsdMaterialX.

Hope this helps!

Karma Ramp Doesn`t Work Jan. 15, 2026, 10:53 a.m.

Instead of the ramp parm, try the Karma Constant Ramp VOP (https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/vop/kma_rampconst.html), see if that works for you.

material applying issue with .USD geo Jan. 15, 2026, 10:51 a.m.

Hard to tell without a hip file, but try assigning to the geomsubsets of the mesh prims...