Eilef Sandnæs

https://youtu.be/FAx3rSHH-Sk?si=WXs7NjV4FM0YkO89 [youtu.be]

Always good to have new features. But Solaris camera do have autofocus selected objects.

Workaround for the guides could be to add a png with your wanted guides to the forground image on the camera.

I would like the post scale from Maya to be read by the Solaris camera, so I don't have to run a python script to tweak the focal length. But probably a USD issue. As Maya only export it with Alembic

GnomeToys
For your "tons of fur" use case I'd suppose the improvements to Blackwell that help the most with that particular feature aren't in Houdini / Karma yet either. Knowing NVidia they might not be in Optix or the drivers yet.

From the blackwell whitepaper:

Blackwell’s RT Core introduces hardware-based ray intersection testing support for a new
primitive called Linear Swept Spheres (LSS). A linear swept sphere is similar to a tessellated
curve, but is constructed by sweeping spheres across space in linear segments. The radii of the
spheres may differ between start and end point of each segment, allowing flexible approximation
of various strand types. As a special case of LSS, the Blackwell hardware primitive also supports
spheres directly (without a swept linear segment), which is useful for applications like particle
systems.

Common use cases, like the rendering of hair on humans, are about 2x faster with LSS compared
to DOTS, while also requiring about 5x less VRAM to store the geometry

As a new primitive I'd only assume Karma would have to explicitly use it.

They claim anything using SER will automatically take advantage of the 2.0 version of it, but then also say that applications can provide more information to assist in better reordering, which is somewhat confusing. They don't really give any numbers for speed increases there since it's likely very application specific.

The other big RT core increase seems to be related to optimizations for nanite-like geometry features that existed in Ada (BVH / triangle clusters) that supposedly double triangle throughput but I'm not sure if Karma uses this feature. It seems targeted heavily at Unreal Engine even though it's theoretically usable by anything.

This sounds like the technique that Redshift uses. Have been some complaining about how it looks close up when the hair/strands are thick.

https://redshift.maxon.net/topic/53084/interpolotion-along-curve-length-s-intinsic-t-issues?_=1755810011795 [redshift.maxon.net]