The R&D Panel coming up at HIVE Horizon [www.sidefx.com] will have lead developers who oversee FX, Solaris, Rendering, Character, PDG, 3rd-party (Houdini Engine), ML, COPs. This panel is a chance for the community to interface with them, to get a glimpse of development objectives, priorities, and general planning. We would like to gather online questions/thoughts/ideas, and combine them with those from live audience attending as well. The 90-minute session will not allow us to cover everything, but perhaps we can rely on community voting/participation to help prioritize some of these talking points. If you have something you would like discussed, please post below+keep the question/thought/idea to a concise 1-2 sentences maximum, thank you!

SideFx has already for quit some time now been providing tutorials on various topics ongoing.
However, is there room for more?
Are a number of capabilities that Houdini has - being underused or not even employed by a broad base of users, who don't quit have the technical understanding - which more in depth tutorials may provide?

As one example - with Copernicus and the direction it is taking - the advantage of knowing how to utilize opencl can open many doors.

One of the most ubiquitous parts of Character Design is clothing. Tools like Marvelous Designer do not run on Mac, which Houdini does, but in Houdini there are no tailoring tools or default clothing templates.

What are the future plans for clothing and garment simulations?

Thanks for the input! I have included them into the list of talking points and will try to keep a tight schedule to get all points discussed (not only what was mentioned here).

With the MPM solver, are there plans to refine and add features for more control ability? For different materials.

I've been working with MPM metal and am pleased with what I am getting, however when it comes to being able to get a mix of tight smooth bends and also sharp acute creases - like what you can get with aluminum foil;

I'm finding I have to do a bit of pre and post sim work.

I reviewed some videos on vellum, as I'm not experienced with that solver and saw a video specifically dealing with creases.
There were a number of what I could see as parallel controls.(compared to using metal setting with MPM).

A couple setting parameters that seems like it would be useful and not present in metal is 'fall off' controls and 'edge angles'.

These two seem like they could be instrumental in helping a metal sim create a mix of smooth round bending and acute creased bends.

I probably could put in an RFE but I know nothing of the under the hood principals at work, so really in the dark of what to request;
(I probably could achieve such things with a wrangle in the solver working with the attributes directly).

But like the question I first asked - I would think, that perhaps MPM is a work in progress too, so it's just a matter of time for these types of refinements?

Edit: Just discovered the Crease SOP / Wrinkle deformer - so, should play around with those.

Rendering..

Desired workflow:

1) Render using a fixed camera, lopnet and/or frame. All without dependancies on the presence of a viewports with lopnet and what not.

2) Render gallery not being tied to a single lopnet. (I know, internal database thing, but still).

3)/obj rendering in Karma technically works but everything hurts.



1 can be done using a render clone, would be nice if that could be done locally as well.


2 is not that critical but ran into this limitation a few times when having separate lopnets, or have lopnets that import other lopnets etc.

3 To fix this properly I guess things need some mayor refactoring, like /obj level nodes smartly injecting USD directly into the stage without 10 seconds recooks when changing a material color.

Did a quick prototype of this and it's lightning fast ;

And there is also lots of really great stuff in there, but these are my painpoints that make me drop down that redshift node once again

Thx!

Are there any plans for more community driven open source sollutions in Houdini as general. Fe. Possibility to send RFE directly from node? (Lates say new idea for morph node and i send it when iam currently had problem and working with that node) Then LLM can summerize all new sended ideas etc.

Or more open source help files, so its filled with knowlage of users more than just from developers and beta testers.

BTW. More opened (Ideal for everyne) beta testing would be awaome - again more open source community driven sollutions.