richard.gavin

I have been playing around with COPs a good bit recently, mostly for texture generation. I have beeninterested in trying to recreate some substance designer type textures in Houdini. COPs has many quirks,however, it really is quite flexible for an old system. Even with all the quirks I found it relatively easy to rebuild alot of substance designer functionality fairly easily.

To mention some quick pros for your substance question.
In substance we can spend alot of time trying to define our base geometric shapes.
We can build lots of complex shapes in SOPs and with Heightfields that can create interesting patterns quickly. Importing geo attribute into COPs also has lots of potential. The main component it lacks by default is easy ways to tile textures, which I think is solvable.

Some cons that have stuck out that are worth noting,
The channel copy UI is poor. Setting the source and then the target feels somehow inverted to me, though you can of course VOPCOP your way around this.
The composite node can be confusing. I often dont get the result Im expecting from the operations. While this is probably because Im not a great compositor, it feels like results that I would expect with a merge in Nuke or even thinking back to my Shake days do not work for me in COPs. For example when fading down a layer (mixing in Nuke) often results in black images rather than a fade and Im unsure whether to use the foreground/background mix or the masking effect mix.

I mention these two things in particular as the composite node really is the backbone of COPs and I think that channel copying (shuffling) is another important concept where new COPS users will run into a brick wall pretty quickly. Along with instability I can imagine it been a frustrating introduction to compositing in Houdini for most users, which forces sidefx to make a decision to kill it or embrace it. I have some simple intro tips over on Youtube to try and get new users over some of the humps. You can find them here https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCu8pjcmyzDO9iLmCuwsv6uw [www.youtube.com]

but it feels like alot of this needs to be addressed at a UI/UX level.


Outside of my recent interest in substance style texturing, it could be quite appealing for game artists both for texture generation and also fx texture creation. Some basic camera tracking functionality could be useful for smaller teams. For lighters it allows for automated slap comps as well as possibly building texture generation into their look development workflows.

Beyond this I think that we will see more 2D information being useful for 3d, such as 2d motion capture for characters both body and face, as well as interesting developments in AI image generation for example Im having lots of fun lately running estimated depth maps through COPs. Needs some serious investment but potentially worth it imho.

Of course its a float! Thanks uakin, thought I was loosing my mind late last night
Still getting used to solaris/mtlx.

Outside getting used to all the small workflow things I Have to say very impressed with it so far.
Incredibly flexible and karma is sweet.

Hey,
Im using 19.5.403 and experiencing an offset when using displacement with Mtlx in Solaris.

The attached setup is very simple just a grid with an mtlx standard shader
For displacemnt I am just using the brick tex heighmap that ships with houdini.

As you can see in the attached pics, I get the expected result with the principled shader.
With the mtlx setup there is an offset pushing all the points towards the X axis. Im not sure why this is.

I only have one test machine at the moment and would appreciate it if someone can restore my sanity by trying out the attached hip file on their machine so I can confirm its just an issue on my machine.

You just need to go to the stage and use the switch to swap between the mtlx and principled shaders and render with karma to see the result.

Thanks.