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TOTAL DURATION: 1h 18m 29s

Solaris is Houdini’s environment for layout, lookdev and lighting and is built on USD, the open source Universal Scene Description format created by PIXAR. This makes Solaris a great environment for interacting and authoring USD scenes and assets. USD is an optimized system for organizing your assets that allows for efficient workflows for teams or individuals.

In this course you will explore the Solaris UI, beginning with a discussion about what USD is, how to manipulate objects in the Solaris viewport, and how to import and render SOPs geometry in Solaris using Karma. The goal is to introduce you to the concepts of USD and how they are implemented in Houdini using Solaris.

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COMMENTS

  • krzys_kite 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Awesome intro course, filled in some gaps for me. Will we see any follow-up courses?

    • rmagee 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

      Yes - a second one is coming soon

  • lorsange 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    It's outstanding tutorial. Thanks again, Peter.

  • rkoomera 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Awesome course!

  • unreal-universe 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    nice!

  • dunnieboy 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Even though I am familiar with Solaris/USD, I found myself watching these intro vids and wishing they were available when I first started out !
    Excellent intro course. Keep 'em coming.

  • JoshFoster 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Thanks Peter! Great tutorial.

  • alahab 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Thank you for this wonderful course Peter! Lots of valuable information and a great delivery!
    Just FYI that in the scene file that I downloaded, SOP Create section does not have the name SOPs that set "spikes" and "grid". (Video #17 at 01:03)

    • PArcara09 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

      Probably just an issue of me changing something on the fly and not adjusting my master file. I'll make up a new zip file and link that with the fix. Thanks for the heads up!

  • thedimensionxyz 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Brilliant tutorial series! Thanks Peter!

  • HarrryHoudini 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    I downloaded the scene files but can't find the scene in video 4??

    • PArcara09 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

      It is there when I downloaded the linked HIP file. Maybe try downloading the zip again and opening the new HIP file?

      • HarrryHoudini 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

        Hey Peter, thanks for the reply. You're right, it was a problem with the default unzip software on macOS that was the issue. The HIP file is indeed there thanks.

  • Anastasiiadots 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Thank you so so much! Such an awesome explanation!

  • lorsange 1 year, 9 months ago  | 

    Hi again Peter, get some troubles starting with #11 "Color Meanings" section
    Get errors on the Reference node:
    Error Unable to find layer file: -
    Warning Fixed invalid USD path: /_
    Tried to write /$OS instead of /"@sourcename" in Primitive Path, but it won't help with reference::2.0, only with first version of node

  • seanhedman 1 year, 4 months ago  | 

    super in-depth tutorial series. really easy to follow. great for getting us up to speed quickly!

    Just wanted to add one invaluable hotkey for pausing the render in karma.

    shift + P

    That will pause your render so no need to jump into houdini GL to pause.

  • Mike_A 1 year, 2 months ago  | 

    This is a really helpful and practical introduction, especially so with the supplied scene file. Thank you Peter!
    I'm looking forward to your next course on the subject.
    You've taken us through the basics of Solaris and USD, but one thing I'd really like to see you talk about is the 'Why?' Particularly in relation to the solo artist / freelancer. What are the real world advantages of the Solaris workflow over the traditional SOP > ROP workflow for such users?

  • adamghering 10 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    where are the files?

    • Fsl 5 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

      At the top of course list

  • adamghering 10 months, 2 weeks ago  | 

    nevermind lol

  • BabaJ 1 week, 1 day ago  | 

    Video 12 > 2'36"

    Selecting the same light in viewport of scene does not highlight all those lights.(usual yellow)
    Select All is on, Xform Primitives is set drop down, and all viewport display guides/icons(on right side of viewport) are on.

    However, Scene Graph Path does show the 'lights' primitve is selected, and the following edit node does move all the lights as intended.

    Display options don't seem to suggest something is amiss.

    Must be some default settings changed since this video to version 20.5.410?

    • PArcara09 4 days, 18 hours ago  | 

      Hi there,
      I would guess that there is some visual bug happening. We don't often change the default behavior of viewports. With our recent updates to our Vulkan Hydra Delegate from the OpenGL Hydra Delegate, there could certainly be some newly introduced bugs. Also, since Solaris uses USD and Hydra, any time there is a change to those codebases something unintended could happen to our implementations. I would recommend logging a bug for this, as it seems to be easily reproducible and it seems to only affect the highlighting.

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