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Houdini 14 Wishlist


LaidlawFX

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and i don't ask for a nuke quality level ... just a good old shake 2.5 level, with very simple/optimized nodes and a 2D tracker ... But 70% of the work is already done ! it just need some polish. Cause when i see Lookdev/FX guys using a 3000euros nuke license to put 3 merge and 2 color correct and 1 defocus; i always said to myself that  Having a solid tool for precomp would be one more reason to give our precious money to SESI ...

 

Adding the folowing could be cool.

- some sort of internal RSMB that actually work as well (plug and play)

- an efficient defocus a la lenscare

- 2D tracker

- lensflare presets

- discreet like color correct tool( cleaner UI for color curves / cleaner UI for hue curves )

- and let's be crazy ... OFX support :)

Edited by sebkaine
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That would be very nice..

 

and i don't ask for a nuke quality level ... just a good old shake 2.5 level, with very simple/optimized nodes and a 2D tracker ... But 70% of the work is already done ! it just need some polish. Cause when i see Lookdev/FX guys using a 3000euros nuke license to put 3 merge and 2 color correct and 1 defocus; i always said to myself that  Having a solid tool for precomp would be one more reason to give our precious money to SESI ...

 

Adding the folowing could be cool.

- some sort of internal RSMB that actually work as well (plug and play)

- an efficient defocus a la lenscare

- 2D tracker

- lensflare presets

- discreet like color correct tool( cleaner UI for color curves / cleaner UI for hue curves )

- and let's be crazy ... OFX support :)

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For the bidirectional path tracing implementation in Mantra to compute caustics. This could be a very interesting approach to implement in Mantra.

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/beam-rendering-extended-at-siggraph-2014/

 

It looks to be an updated version of VCM implemented in PRman 19.

http://cgg.mff.cuni.cz/~jaroslav/papers/2012-vcm/

Edited by sebkaine
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  • 3 weeks later...

Add some exports/settings to the default mantra surface material, for instance, motion vectors, ambient occlusion, angle of incidence. These can be enabled/disabled for performance reasons.  It would be nice on the mantra render tab for image planes to have the option to do a space transformation at render-time. Image planes are rendered in camera space, but some, like position, would be more helpful in world space.

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On the same topic of the mantra surface material, it would be awesome if each channel has a modifier attribute channel, so we don't have to hack into the asset every time we need to add one to a material.  For example, I was using displacement on an L-System recently and needed displacement to decrease as we get to smaller thickness values.  I had to pass an attribute from the L-System to the shader to modify the displacement percentage as lage increases, which required modifying the material. I end up having to do this a lot, with multiple channels in the material. Many channels are set up to use Cd, but it would be better to be able to assign any attribute we need as a modifier.

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i'd love to see some work in the parmater ui.  i realize a rewrite is unlikely since it would break so much code, but adding things like color, icons, perhaps the ability to resize items or have labels that are dynamic (some kind of auto-update mechanism built into the parm itself).  that'd be great for developing more complex otls.  a better ramp parm would be welcomed as well (i'm sure somebody mentioned that earlier).

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ability to reference FBX files in the same way as .abc instead of importing the geo in the scene.

 

Currently if you unlock animated deformation (Deformation File CHOPs) and geometry (File SOPs) during import (or after unlock file sop manually) than it loads fbx file from disk directly (even if you overwrite original fbx with new version). So exporting geometry with different deformation/changed topology in new fbx and updating it in Houdini isn't problem.

 

But any change (even animated) in object transform isn't updated (it's interpreted with first import as animation curve/keyframes)

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Thanks for the tips Petr. But when i add more geometry the scene is not updated.

 

My goal is to be able to use .fbx exactly like .abc.

- You have a reference scene on your disk

- when you load it inside houdini you are reading this scene on disk

- thus if you update number of object etc ...

- if you make a modification you will just have to refresh to read the new reference file.

 

FBX looks to be very popular for games ... i don't like it particularly,  but .abc is not supported on every apps !

Edited by sebkaine
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Thanks for your feedback Mark ! in fact after playing a litlle. FBX is perfectly supported by the file node. even If the files node doesn't display .fbx in his list of extension.

 

if you load the following nothing happen so you conclude that is doesn't work ... :)

$PATH/objectName.fbx

 

but if you use this synthax you load any component you want

$PATH/objectName.fbx#componentName,convertoff

 

I am trying to find a cool format to transfer static geometry beetween apps.

OBJ is old / suffer from bad compression / had some feature limitation so i really want to put it out of the loop.

 

After some test i find FBX pretty cool compare to .abc for static mesh because

 

- it keeps a clean tree , your outliner is a perfect match beetween maya/houdini you don't have extra group,

- the elements created are default houdini node (subnet / geometry / file )

 

test.jpg

 

- you can read your geo in any app you want maya / houdini / mudbox / UE4 / Blender ... this is not the case for .abc

 

So having a less geek workflow to handle FBX would be cool especially the ability to update the file loaded.

But if it means that the use of packed primitives imply the creation of a complex tree like in .abc, This is not a good idea.

 

So to sum up

- ability to load FBX as reference // OK

- keeping the exact same tree that you would have in other app // OK

- ability to refresh the loading of the file // TO DO

Edited by sebkaine
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One thing I noticed with the wrangle sops is that vex functions are not equally supported in all the wrangles. It would be great if that was added to the documentation for each vex function, stating which nodes are compatible/incompatible.

Edited by bandini
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