In most cases I've found bgeo.sc to be faster compared to alembic and it is quite common practice to cache you're simulation inputs ti disk as bgeo.sc to speed up sims.

materialvariation_random_colors_johnkunz_001.hiplc

You should see motion blur after appending a motion blur LOP into your stage network, this is what tells Karma/USD to store multiple time samples from my understanding. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/kug/motionblur.html

You can grab them from the pop grains shelf setup and plop them into the vellum grains setup like this vellum_grain_sand_vis.hip

That's a cool matrix construction method Andrii! The extract transform and transform by attribute nodes can be used as well. matrixExtractAndInvert.hipnc

I think due to XPU Beta limitations, rasterizing particles to a volume in SOPs and then render that volume is the only option at the present moment. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/karma_xpu.html#features

You can use the ftrim expression in the font sop like this `ftrim(ch("../../../mat/materialbuilder1/volumeshadercore1/phase"))` or see the attached file ftrim_float_in_font.hiplc

hou.isUIAvailable() https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/hom/hou/isUIAvailable.html This will return a boolean so you could do: if hou.isUIAvailable(): some code here for graphical session else: code for headless session here

You can copy the contents of your houdini19.0 folder in your home directory to the new houdini19.5 folder to migrate settings. This can mess things up in some cases though if you have node presets for older interfaces of nodes which have been updated in new versions of Houdini. Most likely nothing to worry about unless you migrate preferences over the duration of several years

Yes, Arnold has it in the tab menu and a shelf button as well https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display/A5AFHUG/Properties

New in 19, this Pack Inject node is probably a better method then Python

In the "Asset Manager" window, set the "Asset Bar" to "Display Menu of All Definitions" https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/windows/optypemanager.html#configuration-tab Operator Type Bar Controls the visibility of the Operator Type Bar that appears at the top of Parameter dialogs. This bar shows the path to the HDA file that defines the node pointed to by the Parameter dialog. The Operator Type Bar can be hidden completely, or it can be in a read-only mode where it simply displays the HDA path, or it can be in a mode where it presents a menu listing all HDAs that contain a definition for the asset. You can then revert back to the previous definition of the sweep node if needed.

Houdini has some support for this kind of functionality via hscript https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/commands/commandecho.html but in my experience it isn't too helpful as very little feedback of ui is actually echoed

You can set this env variable to make preset files slightly easier to manage/edit/merge/diff etc. HOUDINI_ENABLE_OLD_PRESETS If set, the preset menu in the parameter pane toolbar will show the old-style presets options for loading and saving the presets to a file. https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/ref/env.html

This code should work, you can make a new shelf tool by right clicking in any empty shelf space and then choose 'New Tool...' You can paste this in the 'Script' tab: if hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType() == hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Points: hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType(hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Discs) else: hou.ui.curDesktop().paneTabOfType(hou.paneTabType.SceneViewer).curViewport().settings().particleDisplayType(hou.viewportParticleDisplay.Points)