davpe

hi, it's not very clear what are you trying to achieve. pictures are not helping much so it's hard to give any advice. anyways, there is a masterclass on materials mixing in case you haven't seen it: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/houdini-16-masterclass-custom-shading/

hi, 1. if you post a hipfile demonstrating the issue it will be easier to help you. 2. do you have any special reason to pack things in a way you do? i mean, having multiple packed levels isn't typically a great idea. can you pack leaves and branches separately? alongside that, unless your branches are duplicate geometries, there is no benefit from packing them. 3. materials should work fine if assigned on primitive level before packing. if you need to assign them after packing use material stylesheets, or Packed Edit SOP (simpler but doesn't offer that much)

for exporting these additional channels you need to setup a shader with bake exports. watch the masterclass to understand how stuff works: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/h15-masterclass-mantra-rendering-and-texture-baking/ or this for gameDev maps baker: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/game-tools-maps-baker/

in 17.5 snapping to null works perfectly good for me

hi, 1. PolyFill wouldn't work with quadrilaterals on this particular shape as it wasn't able to produce full quad output due to pointed ends (if you made end tips slightly beveled it would work) 2. can't give you a technical answer why remesh was not working for the shape you produced. anyways, when I built the same shape in a way I would normally do it, it magically started to work. i guess polyFill is not really meant to produce a mesh out of curves, and while it did it, it ended up being an invalid surface in some way. cheers, D.

there is a bake texture ROP. this question has been answered a bunch of times here already. there is also a master class at sidefx website (slightly out of date thou). if you using GameDev tools there is also their own GameDev Games Baker which seems to be kind of easier to use but doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the original baker.

hi, check this out https://vfxbrain.wordpress.com/2018/12/04/using-orient-attribute-with-instances/

or directly in shader, also noise-based: there are many other ways how to do something similar, depends what look exactly are you looking for. stripes.hiplc

i haven't opened your scene, but in snippet VOP and inline VOP you generally don't use "ch" command to reference stuff. you just plug it in. it's the same as if you plug P into a Noise VOP for example.

this is perfectly good for running Houdini, but I wouldnt call it entry level hardware for sure. it's better than what i have at home and that was some pretty dear high end stuff just a year ago if you want entry i'd opt for something much more humble if budget is of any importance to you. just saying consider 16gb ram a bare minimum thou.

it definitely works, you must be doing something wrong. check the gif and the hipfile. edit: it works when you have material applied on SOP level with Material node as well. disable_displ.hiplc

works fine for me... render view obeys whatever is set on the ROP regardless what take my houdini scene is in.

hi 1 - if you want to use switch in shader, put it in between the displacement VOP and Displace Output Vars. that works. 2 - if you want to use Disable shader rendering property it will work if you add it to your ROP instead of shader. it should also work as an object property i think, but not sure about that.

this can be approached numerous ways. but i imagine something along these lines could work: (the result should be a detail attribute on lightning geometry, storing the last ground point number that's been hit by the lightning) - on your ground points, create integer point id attribute (@id=@ptnum) - on lightning geometry create an integer detail attribute with the same name, with a value -1 - wire both geometries into Solver SOP - solver SOP will help you to preserve the hit point number over time - use attribute transfer SOP (inside the Solver) with some small radius to transfer @id from ground points onto your lightning geometry - promote @id point attribute to detail (attribute promote SOP), with the method set to Maximum (so you'll end up having a constant attribute value equal to the hit point number, or -1 if no point has been hit at the current frame) - still inside Solver SOP, drop down Attribute VOP running over Detail, and wire in the previous frame result and the current frame result - inside that VOP read the transferred id number. if it is greater than -1, use that value. if it's equal to -1, it means that the lighting geometry is not touching the ground at the current frame, and you want to use the result of the previous frame (which may be also -1 if the lightning never hit the ground yet, or it may be the last point number it hit) unfortunately I can't post a hip file with the setup but hopefully it'll help as a guideline. cheers.

I'm not a Katana user, but I have used Houdini a lot for big and small projects. In overall I'm very happy with it as a lighting tool, and it's developing rapidly. Even super heavy film stuff can be handled very efficiently (depends on your workflows thou). If you already have Houdini implemented, I don't think there is any significant benefit to having Katana alongside - Houdini can do all of it. Katana for sure offers some nice lighting/shot handling tools, but Houdini can be used for doing all sorts of stuff, which can aid lighting/lookdev significantly due to it's ability to actually work with and modify the geometry, allowing arbitrary attributes and processing, without having to transfer data between packages (this is a HUGE advantage, especially with big stuff). So i guess Houdini is more efficient and capable tool in overall. It also offers a very open architecture where you can virtually build your own pipeline/workflow tools with HDAs and PDG, that suit exactly your needs, and it can be done quite easily without extensive programming skills. Sidefx tech support is one of the best I've ever dealt with, which I can't say about Foundry. Last, but not least, I don't know what's the price of Katana license but I imagine it's not exactly cheap. I believe $3000 for Houdini Core is a competitive price, considering it's a multipurpose package.