davpe

didn't know blender has USD support. "experimental branch" doesnt sound like something polished enough to rely on might look into it thou. I'm quite keen thou to test this ProRender for Houdini you mentioned. would be more straightforward than sending data between different apps for sure. anyways, thank you guys, i appreciate all the info and suggestions here.

hmm, cant really argue against that, as I'm not sure how to reliably test that. anyways, it's still incomparably more efficient than unpacking the whole thing.

yeah, well first of all I'm only interested in eevee for super fast outputs. second, thing is that handling unpacking geo in general is not an option on many projects - I'm afraid that slowness of such workflow, and handling of huge caches would overweight benefits of faster rendering. third, an idea of doing extra work of "recreating" instances in blender is not a viable option. we just want to load the shit in, drop an enviro light, plug in textures and have turntable render (for instance) in 10 mins. pro render for houdini sounds like an interesting alternative. will look into it. thanks for your insights anyways

anim: when i say instances i mean packed geo.

it's a shame thou it cannot work with instances at this point. quite light scenes in Houdini become super heavy as everything needs to be unpacked. does anyone have any info on whether there is an effort from Blender side to address that? i was trying to google it and found a bunch of people complaining about that but that was about it...

yeah alright guys, thanks for your help. i was trying to read packed geo and that was apparently too ambitious attempt but otherwise it works fine with regular geo and hierarchy from @path. cheers, D.

Hey, I'm just having a bit of fun playing around with Blender to see if it's feasible for us to do some previz renders with Eevee. Everything else is done in Houdini, it's just about rendering it in Blender. So I exported an Alembic with a @path attribute to build a desired scene hierarchy. Unfortunately, Blender doesn't seem to be able to read this and when I bring in my rbd sim with 1000 pieces, it will generate 1000 objects in Blender, instead of what I want based on the path attrib. Also, everything is called like geometry001, geometry002, etc. This is quite an essential feature, so I hope there is a workaround to make it work? Thanks for any advice. D.

EDIT: Nevermind, I got it, you just have to click a + button in the Parameters... hey, I'm back with this so I'm using the latest build from nightlies - it looks different now indeed (icons), even thou there was no indication of it being a different build. Anyways, still no AOV slots... anybody?

ok, thanks for info, not sure where were I supposed to get that link? anyways, the latest version for houdini seems to be 41203, which is the one I've got installed (I believe). this is all extremely confusing.

well, I see what you say. However, I went to Chaos Group website and downloaded 17.5.293 (Qt5). And this is what I got. There is no much choice in terms of builds or anything. Or is there any other "secret" location where they have "up to date" builds?

i don't... i've got latest build.

hi, so I'm wondering about the same thing. there is no info whatsoever on how to do that. if it's possible, how exactly you go about extracting an AOV from inside a shading network??

well you can do whatever you want to the grid. it can have any geometry detail. then you just apply megascans textures on top of it. as for how to merge it with the rest of your environment, it's a very broad question that is beyond the scope of a forum post, I'm afraid. there is dozen of ways how to approach such a task and it largely depends on what are you working with and what are you trying to achieve exactly.

I would go to Megascans library.

That's a good question and it would be really handy. but so far neither I found a way how to keep SOP assignments after import. RFE?