CYTE
Is there a way to fix this?

Hey Cyte.

Try adding a treeview pane to your custom desktop, it is used to locate your current location. Without that it falls back to create it in /mat.

Hey Magnus,

you`re the man! works perfectly thanks a lot!

Cheers
CYTE

Today a new update of the Houdini LiveLink plugin was released, version 1.9.4. Here is a little change log since the previous 1.8 version.

• The LiveLink UI will now only show Render engines actually loaded by Houdini.
  
  
• There is a new “Settings” window in “Quixel Megascans” drop-down menu, making it easier to edit the settings.
  
  
• There is a new direct link in the “Quixel Megascans” drop-down menu to the online documentation.
  
  
• Export for PNG / TGA / TIFF file formats should now work better.
  
  
• The “Use EXR Displacement” toggle on all the HDAs have been removed, it now happens at export time instead.
  
  
• Arnold Warning for No extension for filename “” have been fixed.
  
  
• Arnold .TX generation has been changed to ON by default.
  
  
• Arnold and Octane HDAs have been updated to output fallback values when no textures are assigned, which should result in some materials looking better now.
  
  
• Redshift TriPlanar Quixel HDA input pins now work as expected.
  
  
• Octane Scattering had broken, should now work again.
  
  
• a “UI UpScale” options was added in the new settings window.
  
  
• Arnold Instances changed to ‘Fast Point Instancing’ so they cast shadows.
  
  
• Arnold default material added to instance sphere and grid so they can receive shadows.
  
  
• Exporting Atlases such as leaves with opacity would crash the exporter when exported materials had opacity and was exported for Arnold. This has been fixed.
  
  
• The Display flag for the objects created inside the “SOURCE” Subnets are now turned off.
  
  
• The Octane ‘Hide object’ parameter to fix scattering didn’t work correctly for none scatter objects that had multiple objects. This should now work correctly.
  
  
• A rare case when a scatter object consisted of several source files instead of one with several items with in it, would set the display flags wrong for Octanes ‘hide object in render’ parameter. This should now work correctly.
  

It looks a great value addition for houdini artists. I wonder if its possible to have houdini wind on the imported megascans plants exactly like in unreal engine. Is this something you could share ? thx

Hi Magnus,

I'm having a play with the QuixelBridge, overall I think it's very cool! So happy to see it on Linux too

One question, how to extract the Appimage? For security we can't run AppImages at work, so (for example) Krita we extract out and then install to a known location etc.

I tried the usual “–help” on the appimage but the Quixel one doesn't seem to be standard?

Also, we'd want to convert to RAT format not EXR, so I was hoping to add that myself after extracting the Appimage. I'd definitely recommend you add that too, as EXRs are much slower and use a lot more memory in Mantra than RAT.

Cheers,

Peter B

Also, unrelated, there is a link to “Download Mixer for Linux” but it links to the OSX dmg file. Do you know if Mixer for Linux is coming?

@efxlab, I am not 100% sure how they do it in Unreal plugin but the Quixel Assets comes with Vertex Color information where R is a mask for wind effects and G is meant to be used to offset the wind. The plugin renames these to ‘q_wind’ and ‘q_offset’ vertex attributes in Houdini since I didn't want it to use the Cd attribute. However it remains as a vertex attribute and you might want to promote them to point attribute depending on what you want to do.

With that said I have been developing something similar automated, for the Houdini plugin that does wind on instance and source object level instead of shader since I wanted it to be usable for all the render engines, it will hopefully be finished soon.
I've posted early tests of it here:

https://www.instagram.com/p/BrcgjtQnsCI/ [www.instagram.com]

@pbowmar, I will forward these things to the linux / bridge and mixer people since it falls on their table. I would also recommend that you put in a formal requet in the Zendesk form so that it gets logged propperly. But I do agree with all things And I am not sure of the plans regarding the Mixer.

https://megascans.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/requests/new? [megascans.zendesk.com]

MagnusL3D
With that said I have been developing something similar automated, for the Houdini plugin that does wind on instance and source object level instead of shader since I wanted it to be usable for all the render engines, it will hopefully be finished soon. I've posted early tests of it here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BrcgjtQnsCI/ [www.instagram.com]

That's awesome Magnus. Thanks for your work.

@MagnusL3D, how you scatter with display as point cloud or bounding box instead full packed geo (with render full geometry) ?
when there is lots scattering with forest the houdini display may be very slow to show, how you deal that ?

I noticed that instance node work better in arnold with ‘Full point instancing’ instead Fast point instancing (which render dark texture instance). On your side How you deal that with redshift (because you are a redshift user) ?

I'd like understand how you tweak the quixel scattering node to retain the new normal/up in video at 33:59 (v@up = @opinput1_N)

Hey there,

I always get this error message when importing stuff from Bridge :

Traceback (most recent call last):
File “opdefVop/quixel_redshift_texture::1.0?OnCreated”, line 46, in <module>
AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘set’

Seems like it's missing something, any idea ?

Thanks

@efxlab:
- You can set “Scene Polygon Limit” under the Display options “Optimize” tab in Houdini.

- Fast Point Instancing is needed for Arnold instances to cast shadows. Don't ask me why

- I will guess that you in fact mean time 32:07 with the tree branches. and if so it is right there. you just allow editing of the quixel scatter node, go in and bypass the normals as shown in the video.

@Dusmus:
- That could be either that your using a old RedShift (we've had people using over 1 year old RS before with similar issues) or perhaps a new one. Which RS version are you using ?

@pbowmar:
- something coming for you in future updates, see attached images.

@efxlab: Here is a example file of how I calculated the “growth direction” on the Tree geometry before the actual scattering if that helps.

Nice one, cheers Magnus!

hello Magnus, thanks for your help and support, I just tested on copy stamp, the tube goes in the same direction, maybe it needed too the up vector ? I will test directly on a quixel scatter soon.

see the 2nd image test with quixel scatter.

@efxlab, It looks like you skipped the step preparing the twigs mentioned in the video, and then skipped the step customizing the quixel scatter node. The example file was only meant to help with how I calculated the growth direction. You still need to do those other steps in the video.

MagnusL3D
@efxlab, It looks like you skipped the step preparing the twigs mentioned in the video, and then skipped the step customizing the quixel scatter node. The example file was only meant to help with how I calculated the growth direction. You still need to do those other steps in the video.

Yeah Magnus I got it for preparing the twig, it was clear, but for the quixel customizing it was not very clear. Is it possible to show the node you modified and where is it in the graph ?
thanks again for your input.

@efxlab, I am not sure if this will work but here is the example file with the customization to the quixel scatter node.

Hey Magnus,

Thanks for the reply I'm on RS 2.5.48. That's probably why.

Cheers

hey Magnus,

Your custom quixel scatter out an error :

“
Warning:

/obj/lsystem1/quixel_simple_scattering1:

Unknown channel(s) ”freq4“ converted to spare parameter(s).

/obj/lsystem1/quixel_simple_scattering1:

Skipping unrecognized parameter ”enable_wind“.
Skipping unrecognized parameter ”wind“.
Skipping unrecognized parameter ”wind_vector“.
Skipping unrecognized parameter ”wind_speed“.
Skipping unrecognized parameter ”freq4“.
Skipping unrecognized parameter ”amp2“.
”

Its relative to your wind setup. Else not the scatter works fine.
The wind is the new quixel scatter update you are working on ?
thanks