Hi, I'm really curious about Karma as a stand alone renderer and would love to test it out on USDviewer, is there a way to do this or some resource I can check to get a starting point?

19 was an Amazing release btw, congrats to the team

You can run the usdview that ships with Houdini, and Karma should work out of the gate. If you want to run Karma inside your own build of USD, that could be a much more involved process, and I wouldn't recommend it unless it is really, really important.

Thank ypu so much, I didn't know there was a usdview shipping with houdini, I would really like to develop a pipeline where the asset lookdev could be made in another software and then rendered with Solaris, getting team members up to speed with houdini, even if it's just for Solaris can be costly, If I could run Karma on the AMD hydra delegate plugin for Blender it would let us save on our asset pipeline and invest that money in a couple of artists\ lics for Houdini to be the hub where we update the manifest.

Is there a place where I can find some guidance o how to build the delegate or how I can take this delegate?

The easiest way is via the 'husk' command line application. That will render any USD fed to it. If you want some sort of integration beyond offline rendering, you can still do it in H19, which is awesome.

thank you, yeah I see H19 can do integrations, and the pricing for karma is not bad at all, I would like to know if there is a cmake or some files I can use to build the delegate and use it as a third party render or which would be the way to test this out.

On the karma page it states:
"Since Karma works both inside Houdini and as a Hydra delegate in other USD-based applications, SideFX is planning to bundle licenses with Houdini Core and FX for FREE and charging for extra licenses. "

What is not clear to me at this time is if this is something sidefx is going to compile, or can we test it ourselves?
If Karma works as a third party renderer, even if it is for look dev, this would definitely would be something to consider, but I can't find any information that describes this process.

In order to use karma within blender as a render delegate, you'll need to build karma against the USD library you are using to build the blender plugin. First, make sure that USD version you're building against is 21.08, or you'll have issues. Then go to https://github.com/sideeffects/HoudiniUsdBridge/tree/houdini19.0 [github.com] and follow the instructions. If you're on Windows, there will be a bunch of fiddling involved with makefiles and such, but it can be done. You also may need to overwrite some of the binaries that ship with Houdini with the ones you build yourself.

As mentioned above, this is only recommended if you really have to do it, and if you know what you're doing and are comfortable with using cmake, and building and integrating your own tools and libraries. That github repository is provided somewhat "as-is"... We know it can be made to work, but we don't have a lot of resources available for supporting you if you run into difficulties getting it built and running.

Jason's suggestion of using husk is a really good one, IMO. It won't give you in-veiwport interaction in a third party tool, but it might not be that hard to set up some level of automation to make it easy for artists to get karma previews.

Another alternative which might also work would be to build the blender USD plugins against the Houdin iUSD library, instead of trying to build karma against your own USD libraries. But I have no idea how difficult that would be, and you'd want to watch and make sure that this doesn't cause a Houdini-type license to be checked out when you run blender (it shouldn't, but it's something to watch for).

Thank you so so so much, I know it's an involved process, enev building 3Delight has been full of hurdles and this was suposed to be straightforward, but at least I can give it a shot now!