Jim Price

The only value(*) in having a Python front end is just quick prototyping and exploring ideas in a Jupyter notebook or similar before committing to C/C++. If you just need Python and Houdini, as you said, use the Hython/hou module. Nice and easy.

* - I say this having done a thin wrapper myself. https://github.com/shadeops/pyHAPI [github.com]

Very cool indeed. I'm especially interested in the memory requirements so far, really promising! When attempting this in Mantra I ended up having to use a Google Cloud instance that had +130GB of RAM to be renderable all at once. (This was using a heavily nested packed primitive workflow.)

Definitely RFE worthy. I would love a more formal CVEX Geometry Shader that would allow manipulation of geometry objects. Internally we did exactly this and the lighters use it to do last minute tweaks to geometry they get from the FX dept. Saves from having to destroy the filers from another intermediate cache.

So ya, RFE away!