malexander

If they can show their pyro interacting with fluids or deforming geometry while spawning realistic sparks, then maybe people might start to feel a bit threatened. But the more features that are added, the slower things get. Directors often want things to look a certain way, so control is a pretty big thing to lose. But if they can offer all that, kudos to them. I just didn't see it in the video.

Looks nice, though it'll be a lot slower when you actually want to read it back to do anything with. That's why most realtime demos are just that.

No, Nuke is a much more complete solution. COPs is a bit outdated.

You can import Alembics directly into USD, so yes, it can take .abc and convert it on the fly.

A third party render engine just needs to have a render delegate for Hydra. There's nothing special to get it running within Solaris or Houdini. If it works outside of Houdini, it'll work within it.

Open the Color Correction bar (viewport menu "Persp" > Correction) and you'll see the Display / View being used in the viewport. My guess is that it's not set to the right view.

If all you're doing is manipulating assets that are on disk, then you probably won't need to leave LOPs much. But you can also import objects, sops, and dops into LOPs, use SOPs to generate geometry, and VOPs to generate shaders as well. These tasks are still done in their own contexts, though sometimes within a LOP itself (eg, the Point Instancer LOP can contain SOPs, so it doesn't feel like you're jumping to another context as much). Having it as part of Houdini gives you a lot of flexibility that you wouldn't otherwise have in a separate application. Because of the way USD is structured you can edit any asset in the scene with a LOP. So that asset might originate as a file on disk, be generated within LOPs (lights, cameras, simple geometry like a cube), or from SOPs, but once it's pulled in, you can non-destructively edit it with LOPs. So in that sense, you can edit everything in the same context, LOPs. Hope that clarifies things a bit.

memtest is a good first step. If that's clean, then start swapping components out one at a time until it stops bluescreening. If it doesn't, you may have a power supply issue or a broken motherboard/cpu.

The ogl_reflect property wasn't properly being sent though to the environment light shader. This has been corrected in 17.5.285. If you want to use specular color to affect the reflection, you'll need the ogl_spectint property set to 1. Generally speaking the ogl_reflect parameter (float, 0...1) is better though.

Can't view the forum post if I don't have an account. Could you post the relevant details here?

It's: $HIP/tex/Display_A_`clamp($F,1, 130)`.jpg clamp() holds the first value if less than the min, and the last value if greater than the max.

Yes, switch to Shaded (instead of Wire over Shaded).

Yes, in the view state it's Ctrl+Alt+RMB to draw a box around the area to zoom, and Ctrl+Alt+MMB to pan that area. Drawing a box from right to left will reset to the full area.

Yes, same basic node, just named slightly different because it's living in a non-ROP context. You're correct about the root object (the object below which exporting is done) and Objects (which of those objects that are children of the root object to export).

They only apply to heightfield rendering at the moment, not general polygon rendering.