Michael Kirylo

not the same issue he is refering to the render engine. autodesk did the same thing until they purchased arnold then took like 5 years to port it into max . max users had to purchase a functional 3rd party render engine to use max , usd is not the issue its forcing everyone to use solaris since sidefx is no longer supporting houdini as an authoring tool. Mantra is no longer supported so the only option is to purchase a 3rd party renderer if you want anything modern with support. IDK what the other formats have to do with any of this. I dont want to have a to take my full crowd setup and port in into solaris now just to be able to render with the newer suported render engine. its not trivial to move pipeline tools and workflows it cost money and time. and I think its just a crappy move on their part. just so they can say "look how successfull solaris is " well yeah no shit. Arguing about usd is not the point of the thread. would be ok if i could just obj merge into a lop and then render but you cant you have to know about the pixar usd workflow and you have to pay attention to the scene graph and how things are named / layered and all the rules to usd in order for things to render. being forced to have to get into all of that sucks is my point. I am perfectly happy using houdini for 98% of everything I have no need to port data anywhere we dont have sep departments we are all generalist for the most part.Everyone I know dislikes solaris and just feels bullied into using it. we have a ton of hda assets and tools already . why do i need to rework our entire pipeline ? solaris to me is the same vibes as lightwave . modler / layout ..

exactly is this the roadmap plan? all I want to know so I can go back to using houdini for only fx .

Correct about usd I’m talking about Solaris. I don’t want to jump into another context and build all my lighting look dev there and loose all my attributes / connections to Houdini. Just seems like Houdini as an authoring tool is being left behind . Unless I’m missing something . Will karma ever replace mantra? Or is the plan to just not be able to render from obj level in the future ? Main thing for me I I don’t want to deal with layers and the way my obj are named and structured that’s why I left maya in the first place .