Houdini 20.5 Solaris and Karma

Sample Scenes

Useful scenes and assets for learning Solaris and USD.

On this page

Houdini ships with a handful of USD scenes and assets. Some demonstrate best practices for arranging USD scenes or assets. Others are just useful models and scenes for testing different workflows.

Scenes

These are mostly complete scenes, and all include a camera at /World/Camera.

Tip

These are intended to be opened using a Sublayer LOP.

Cornell Box

$HH/usd/scenes/cornell_box/cornell_box.usd

The classic Cornell Box rendering scene. Adapted from Pablo Delgado’s CC0 version.

Includes a variant set called contents, with an alternative of the scene which replaces the boxes with spheres.

Material Lookdev

$HH/usd/scenes/material_lookdev/material_lookdev.usd

A material look-development test scene. Provides a consistent scene for comparing materials and renders.

Noise Sampler

$HH/usd/scenes/noise_sampler/noise_sampler.usd

Demonstrates various sources of noise in renders.

Originally created for the Karma User Guide

Veach MIS Planks

$HH/usd/scenes/veach_mis_planks/veach_mis_planks.usd

Inspired by Eric Veach’s PhD thesis.

Assets

Some of these may already be available from the Tab menu in LOPs or the Layout Asset Catalog.

Tip

Use a Reference LOP or Asset Reference LOP to add these to your scene.

Barrel

$HH/usd/assets/barrel/barrel.usd

Crag

$HH/usd/assets/crag/crag.usd

Rubber Toy

$HH/usd/assets/rubbertoy/rubbertoy.usd

Shaderball

$HH/usd/assets/shaderball/shaderball.usd

Simple Primitive

$HH/usd/assets/simpleprimitive/simpleprimitive.usd

Squab

$HH/usd/assets/squab/squab.usd

Template Body

$HH/usd/assets/templatebody/templatebody.usd

Template Head

$HH/usd/assets/templatehead/templatehead.usd

Tommy

$HH/usd/assets/tommy/tommy.usd

Wine Barrel

$HH/usd/assets/wineBarrel/wineBarrel.usd

Solaris and Karma

USD

Geometry

  • SOP Geometry I/O

    Details of how Houdini converts SOP geometry to USD, and how you can control the process.

  • Component Builder

    The Component Builder tool puts down a network snippet for creating a USD model from SOPs, with support for materials, variants, payloads, and layering.

Layout

  • Stage Manager

    How to work with the Solaris stage effectively.

  • Edit node

    Interactively transforms prims in the viewer. Can use physics collisions to position props realistically.

  • Layout node

    Provides tools for populating a scene with instanced USD assets. You can place individual components, paint/scatter components in different ways using customizable brushes, and edit existing instances.

  • Custom Layout Brushes

    How to create layout brush digital assets you can use to customize the behavior of the Layout LOP.

Look Development

  • MaterialX

    Houdini has VOP node equivalents of the MaterialX shader nodes. You can build a shader network using these nodes, or import an existing MaterialX-based shader, and use them with Karma (Houdini’s USD renderer).

  • UDIM paths

    You can encode different tiles of a texture space into different texture files, each with its own resolution. You can then specify a texture filename such as kaiju.exr, and Houdini will replace the token with the specific tile address at load time.

  • Shader translation framework

    Describes the Solaris shading framework, including shader node translation to USD primitives.

Karma User Guide

Karma basics and workflows