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Karma, A Beautiful Game is brought to you by Moeen Sayed, the creator of the Houdini isn’t Scary and VEX isn’t Scary tutorial series. With Houdini 19, Karma is production ready and these new lessons let you explore its key features and capabilities.

Learn how to transition to Karma from Mantra and how to work within the Solaris context. Learn how to set up shaders with VEX and MaterialX then explore Motion Blur, Depth of Field, AOVs and other render settings that control the quality of your final image. These lessons will give you a good working knowledge of the Karma renderer.

CREATED BY

Moeen
MOEEN SAYED

Visual Effects artist for over 6 years and Houdini tutorial content creator. Co-founder of Nine Between, a South African Visual Effects Studio. Currently based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

More from Moeen Sayed

COMMENTS

  • Renzell 3 years ago  | 

    With this one, Part 0.8 I'll have to Replay this a few time to get it to stick.

  • Arvan 3 years ago  | 

    After years of using Mantra, this has been a really informative and easily-accessible introduction to the new Karma workflow and a bit of Solaris.

    Thank you for sharing your valuable insight and knowledge, Moeen!

    • Moeen 3 years ago  | 

      Awesome to hear Arvan, thank you for the positive comment!

  • knockflakes 3 years ago  | 

    Sooooooooo nice!!! Thänx a lot!:)

    • Moeen 3 years ago  | 

      You're welcome, thanks for watching and leaving a comment!

  • Ferdinand13 3 years ago  | 

    Hey Moeen, great tutorial series. I wouldn't have thought that Karma would be so advanced at this stage.

    I heard a lot of people doubting the use of XPU in production - and I appreciate that it is still in Beta - but in terms of rendering it is fast, like Octane-fast! I'm a bit taken aback by that. Is XPU supposed to get faster yet or just more stable? And, is it using only one GPU or multiple (I've got a 3x RTX 2080 Super setup). I'm a regular Redshift user, but these results have me really stumped!

    • Moeen 3 years ago  | 

      Hey Ferdinand, thanks!

      I agree, XPU seems promising. I'm also a Redshift user (for 3 years at this point). However, I think that Solaris and USD with the promise of a stable XPU renderer is a great reason to start using Karma. I'm not certain as to whether it is supposed to be getting faster or only more stable. With CPU, there were a lot of minor improvements and speed increases as it got closer to final release over and above the stability improvements. I'm fairly certain it will be the same with XPU. Either way, I think its a worthwhile renderer to look into. I have seen some incredibly promising results with CPU so I'm expecting great things from XPU too.

      Anyways, thanks for watching and leaving a positive comment, I appreciate it!

  • Nathan_T_Anderson 3 years ago  | 

    Very concise and useful! Baie dankie!

    • Moeen 3 years ago  | 

      Kiff, thanks, didn't expect that lol

  • pete4d 3 years ago  | 

    Hi. How do we specifiy how many subdiviosn levels we render with the displacement on. I would like to controlt he tessellation.

  • surajkumar7c 2 years, 11 months ago  | 

    Need a Tutorial on Rendering Pyro with Karma XPU !

  • wneessen 2 years, 11 months ago  | 

    As usual for your tutorials, this is really great and a helpful resource. Would love to see a tutorial on how you built/modeled the whole chess board and pieces as well.

  • Hubert Gadomski 2 years, 11 months ago  | 

    Thank you for this tutorial, you explain very well and without hurry. Good job! It would be great to see some tutorials about how to properly use and setup pbr textures ( with opacity and emission from Substance Painter) into some kind of game ready object. Maybe there is such a tutorial...? Any way, thank you.

  • ssokmen 2 years, 11 months ago  | 

    I was so worried how to get my hands dirty with all the new Karma stuff, but didn't know where to start, this course cleared many things!
    Thanks a lot!

  • kumpa 2 years, 11 months ago  | 

    Very helpful and well exceptionally well narrated tutorial. 5/5

  • Mattbrunner 2 years, 9 months ago  | 

    Excellent work Moeen! This is tremendously well crafted. I am wondering how you get the Nvidia Optix Denoiser into Houdini now? It is no longer on the Edit menu dropdown and the Nvidia site isn't much help either. Thanks again!

  • OneBigTree 2 years, 7 months ago  | 

    Brilliant work. I will try transition from Redshift to Karma.. I do not like Maxon and subscription programs... ;)

    • OneBigTree 2 years, 7 months ago  | 

      Btw: how does motion blur work when using the Karma ROP on the object level?

  • NoctisC7 2 years, 6 months ago  | 

    By the way can I have infinite bounces of light until it gets absorbed in Mantra/Karma? Like I saw limit 0 in render settings, but I don't quite get what is that mean - like if its not direct light only (bounce 1) than its mean 0 limit is adaptive bounces right?

  • Praxidis 2 years, 6 months ago  | 

    muchas gracias!!!

  • MarceloRibeiro 2 years, 4 months ago  | 

    Very useful material, i finally have no more nightmares about Solaris and Karma ! :)

  • vankyang 2 years, 4 months ago  | 

    Is there an update to Houdini 19.5? It seems the black Pawns are white, not inheriting material correctly, and I'm unsure how to change that. Wonderful tutorial!

  • Sergey Filin 2 years, 3 months ago  | 

    Brilliant set of tutorials! You are a perfect tutor! Thank you!

  • walkinginspace 2 years, 2 months ago  | 

    This may be a really stupid question, but how do you save out a image sequence...like the Save to Disk button...or is it in a ROP? would love any info on that!

  • bbossin 2 years, 1 month ago  | 

    MOEEN SAYED,

    Love the tutorial series, but unfortunately I am getting an error in Houdini 19.5.368. I apologize if this is a user error.

    The error is that the displacements seems to be be off on all objects that have displacement via Material X. This has occurred in Tutorial 4 and 5 so far. I downloaded the source files again to see if that was the issue. I downloaded the files with no cache and the cached version. I was able to fix the issue Tutorial 4 as I could access the displacement node on the Material X shader and retune the settings. In tutorial 5 the issue occurs again, but I am having a difficult time accessing the shaders displacement settings.

    • Huwapeton 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

      I had the same issue with 19.5.435

    • MarkHawk 1 year, 5 months ago  | 

      Same as above on 19.640 but now also getting the following errors at launch.


      Warning:

      /obj/Full_Scene/karma_final:

      Skipping unrecognized parameter "diffusesamples".
      Skipping unrecognized parameter "reflectionsamples".
      Skipping unrecognized parameter "refractionsamples".
      Skipping unrecognized parameter "volumesamples".
      Skipping unrecognized parameter "ssssamples".
      Skipping unrecognized parameter "lightsquality".
      Skipping unrecognized parameter "denoise_useGl".
      Skipping unrecognized parameter "offlineoptimization".

  • xolobjam 2 years ago  | 

    Thank you very much - really helpful...specially how even cryptomattes are covered

  • redman74_1401 1 year, 11 months ago  | 

    Thank you, very clear introduction to Solaris.

  • parangp 1 year, 8 months ago  | 

    Hello Moeen!

    Thank you for this tutorial. It very much helped me in getting started with solaris.

    I would like to request you to kindly make a video explaining occlusion, shadow matte, camera projections.

    Thanks again.

  • Charles Kirk 1 year, 3 months ago  | 

    There are two issues with the MaterialX VOP in Part 4 with Houdini 19.5.

    The Normal Image Signature needs to be set to Vector3, NOT color.
    The Displacement Image Signature needs to be set to float, not color.

    • rafagos 1 year, 3 months ago  | 

      Hey Charles!
      Thank you for your comment - I was able to find the displacement error by myself, but I was facing problems with the Normal Image.
      It helps me a lot.

    • reddriveraa 1 year, 3 months ago  | 

      Thanks! I was looking for the solution for this.

    • AhmedHindy 1 year, 1 month ago  | 

      thank you, this solved my problem in H19.5.640

  • mulaloday2 1 year, 2 months ago  | 

    very good tutorial for the some reason in both houdini 18.5 and 19 the renders are coming out pink. I reloaded textures and still pink. settings all same .
    Also when I just open the project hip files and press karma view it comes up with error message. The mantra renders fine on both 18 and 19
    here is the message

    Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "Driver/karma/karmaview", line 1, in <module>
    File "C:/PROGRA~1/SIDEEF~1/HOUDIN~1.759/houdini/python3.7libs\hou.py", line 47568, in __getattr__
    return _hou.HDAModule___getattr__(self, name)
    AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'karmaViewport'

  • Fernando_Criativo3d 11 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    In Houdini 20 wondering where do I find metalness in MTLxstandard_surface.....

  • Fernando_Criativo3d 11 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    just figureout!

  • Th22X1 9 months, 4 weeks ago  | 

    The workflow in part 4 is already depricated with Houdini 20.

  • vigneshwaranmgs07 5 months, 1 week ago  | 

    THANKYOU

  • kaleem 4 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    Hey Moeen,

    This is a really nice tutorial regarding the USD and mtlx,

    I am facing a issue when I am trying to export the shader in .mtlx,

    I have created my own shader and I tried to export, its working but the code is different when I check it with your exported code in .mtlx (if the code format is different I am not able to take to unreal)
    Can you please tell how you exported the .mtlx, I will send you the snaps as well if required

    Thanks in advance .

  • michelhabib76 2 weeks, 2 days ago  | 

    This is Gold, but needs to be updated to 20.5

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