OTOY Forums

That would be nice to get some little enhancement with Orbx Proxies.

1) Accurate preview of geometry: at the moment when i load an orbx inside houdini the display feature nearly never work accurately. So i have to export a proxy geo and the orbx. Then i set a display flag on the geo proxy and a render flag on the orbx loader. It would be cool to have an accurate preview like in arnold with the .ass loader. You can choose geometry or point clouds preview with a decimation slider for faster preview.

2) edit orbx button : that would also be great to have an edit orbx button like in the maya plugin. When you hit edit, it open the orbx in octane standalone, let you modify things then save the orbx with your edit.

3) support for animated orbx : houdini doesn't seem to be able to read the animation of an animated .abc loaded inside an orbx proxy. This restrain the use of proxies, a lot compare to other render engine.

4) better management of animated .orbx : again it would be nice to get similar feature as the .ass loader where you can define anime offset/startframe, anime retime, of your alembic cache contained in the proxy.

5) ability to instanciate orbx proxies with the copy SOP : That would also be very convenient to be able to instanciate orbx proxies directly by using a copy SOP, like in Redshift that allow us to instanciate proxies directly. For environment scenario it would be really useful. The instance node at /obj level doesn't offer the same amount of flexibility imo. On top of that the ability to inject perpoint attribute inside the anime offset alembic animation of the orbx loader would be great. One could export a trees with 500 frames of wind animation in speed tree and instanciate that single tree with various xform and various startframe to create a windy forest of trees with just one single tree. Also ability to time offset orbx proxies.

6) Support of material map assignation in orbx proxies : last time i checked material maps assignation where not supported inside the houdini orbx loader. they can be very useful at times.

EDIT :
I have try to load the same orbx in c4d, and 1) 2) 3) 5) are working fine.
- The preview point cloud is correct and the animation work in the viewport
- There is an edit button that open the orbx in standalone directly
- The alembic animation match the C4D timeline correctly
- orbx proxies are directly supported by mograph

So i think it is not an octane core restriction, but more a plugin limitation inside Houdini.

I know you have already lot of things to do Juanjo, but having those feature in houdini in the coming years would be great !

Cheers
E

Thanks for these feature requests. Yes, I want to work on the .orxb proxy support at some point this year, so thanks for pointing out these limitations.

-Juanjo

Thanks for your answer Juanjo ! I have added point 6) cause last time i checked, it was not working, but you might have fix this one already, so sorry in advance if it's already done.
now that that the houdini plugin is full featured and stable i really find that the only area that need some polish in the plugin are the import / export feature with the external world :

1) stronger support of orbx proxies :
- being on parity with the c4d loader would already be a great starting point
https://docs.otoy.com/cinema4d/ORBXLoader.html
- Arnold stand-in tools is a great exemple of a solid proxy tool. The stand-in system is more advanced and allow you to browse the scene hierarchy and do local overides and edit.
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display ... /Stand-ins

2) better support for in/out orbx materials :
- import orbx materials from standalone with live db with a perfect match between the node tree would be great ( having to browse all the nodes is really not user friendly at the moment )
- i would also love to see a orbx material node like in maya where you can assign directly an orbx material and edit it in standalone node tree and it is save directly in the houdini scene.
https://docs.otoy.com/MayaH/MayaPluginM ... RBXMat.htm

3) rock solid orbx exporter with anim support and strong filter for what you want to export in the orbx ( again .ass exporter is a good reference )
https://docs.arnoldrenderer.com/display ... en+Plugins

i know this is a lot of work for just one developer, so we must be patient.

Cheers
E

I second to all of these requests! plus one more and this is more like a wish because I know things like these aren't just plain and simple but anything that can speed up the .orbx exporter would be incredible.

I was wondering if there were enhancement regarding orbx import / export / instancing ?
Does any of those area have been enhanced since my initial post ?
Cheers
E