Houdini 18.5 (possibly USD/Karma support)

Deadline Feature Requests
#1

Hey everyone,

Asking if we can expect Houdini 18.5 support for Mantra and possibly even support for Karma. I understand that you don’t want to support Beta Software but it seems like Karma will be labeled “Beta” until it has complete feature parity with Mantra.

I expected that I could simply change the Plugin Path from H18 to H18.5 for Mantra to work through Deadline, but for some reason, it broke everything for me. Even using H18 in Deadline until a clean new install of Deadline + Repository.

So essentially I have packaged three questions in one post.

  1. Will there be H18.5 and Mantra support in the (near) future?
  2. Can we expect Karma/USD support in this release cycle?
  3. Is there a way to use Mantra in Houdini 18.5 right now with Deadline 10.1.10.6?

Thank you all!

When will H18.5 will be supported out of the box with Deadline installer?
#2

Hoping for some h18.5 support as well… There wa a way to make some chengaees in a file or two and get it supported but it;s bin a while since I done it… forgot which ones were :frowning:

#3

Houdini 18.5 and Solaris support would be great! Even if Karma are in Beta, there is still some other renders that are supported in Solaris. Looking forward to using Redshift inside Solaris. Crossing fingers for support is not to far away :slight_smile:

#4

So we can’t talk about the roadmap or our plans for it, but I do have an unofficial patch for Houdini 18.5 here - Houdini185.zip (11.4 KB)

If you copy the existing Houdini plugin into the custom folder and then make these changes you’ll be able to just remove the Houdini folder from in custom so Deadline can fail back to the vanilla version. In general, put custom stuff in the custom folder so you’ve got a failback and so that upgrades don’t blow away your changes.

And I will make note of all the interest in here. :slight_smile:

3 Likes
When will H18.5 will be supported out of the box with Deadline installer?
#5

Cheers! Will test in a bit :slight_smile:

#7

Hi Justin, after swapping these files in repository, adding environmental path still not getting a deadline node in the OUT context.

Since I already had 18.0 working do I need to edit any of the files in AppData\Local\Thinkbox folder?

Any Ideas?

#8

It works perfectly fine here now, rendering h18.5 wihtouth issues with redshift

#9

That’s hard to say - I’d have to see an error log to find a starting point.

#10

The updated plugin patch for H18.5 works perfectly for me on Windows 10.

#11

It turns out we missed changing the paths for 18.5 but I suppose Houdini’s one of those that needs customizing that path regardless.

#12

Got it working. I had two problems. The first was a missing character in the Houdini Path. The second was my Houdini 18.5 folder was missing the python libs 2.7 folder.

I’m assuming these things are automatic when using installer.

#13

Just asking about this, isn’t it possible to support all of the Hydra delegates in Solaris/Houdini by supporting Husk in Deadline? I obviously don’t have the dev knowledge but I have been playing around with Solaris the last few days and based on the console messages I got, it seemed like Husk manages the different render delegates and “only” needs to get triggered.
But again, no render manager development knowledge here, just interested in how this stuff works now with a more unified approach through USD.

1 Like
#14

We’re also looking to investigate how Husk and Deadline could work on our farm here.

#15

Looking at the command line flags for husk would it be possible to submit a husk job via the CommandLine plugin? Depending on how the progress gets printed there might need to be some customization but it should be pretty easy.

Set the executable to husk, and build the arguments from that docs page and you should be in good shape. I haven’t anything to test my hypothsis with, including any idea what you’re hoping to see come out the other end. But if someone who knows Husk wants to poke around I’m happy to supply the Deadline knowledge :smiley:

#16

Hi Justin,
We suspected (or rather hope) it’s exactly as you say, build commandline and run on Deadline. If we come up against any Deadline issues we’ll be back in touch. Was interested to hear if Thinkbox had made any progress on this yet. :smiley:

Cheers

Jamie

2 Likes
#17

It’s been a while since November. We upgraded our Houdini in the Studio and would be really happy to see a Houdini 18.5 and USD support.
Any news on that?

2 Likes
Redshift USD Rendering GPU affinity support
#18

Not sure if this is because of a recent deadline update but I’m actually rendering with Karma right now through Deadline. I just used the Render > Submit to Deadline UI. The USD Render ROP appears in that list just like any other ROP or File caching node. Conveniently it even detects the USD Render ROP inside the Karma HDA. There is no additional info being printed out like it would with Mantra, and the output path can’t be accessed with a right click on the job, but other than that it’s working fine.

4 Likes
#19

A quick update about the Karma situation for me.
When using the method I’ve described above, rendering Karma by submitting the USD ROP inside the Karma node, I sometimes have the issue that Karma doesn’t start to actually render. I can see in the task manager that my cpu spikes to 100% for a second, then down to 5%, then up to 100% again and down again every second or so. While doing that, it doesn’t render or save any frames but also doesn’t report any errors. Not sure what could be causing this as sometimes it works, other times it doesn’t.

Sadly, using TOPS to trigger the USD ROP doesn’t seem to work either as the deadline scheduler seems broken for a few versions now (but I believe that is SideFX code)

I just wanted to add this info in case somebody else wonders why the computer renders the whole night without saving any images.

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