Tutorial: USD Basics with Houdini Solaris

SideFX released a tutorial in which animator and training lead Peter Arcara explains USD basics with Houdini Solaris – an environment for layout, look development, and lighting.

In the course, you will learn what USD is, explore the Solaris UI, find out how to manipulate objects in the Solaris viewport and how to import and render SOPs geometry in Solaris using Karma. The goal of the video is to introduce you to the concepts of USD and how they are implemented in Houdini using Solaris.

You can watch the whole thing on YouTube or separated into chapters on SideFX's website. Here is the outline of the course:

• Introduction
• Terminology
• Resources
• USD Import/Export SOP
• USD Formats and Extensions
• ASCII .usd files
• Similar File Types
• The Scene Graph Tree Pane
• The Scene Graph Details Pane
• Primitive Terminology
• Color Meanings
• Viewport Manipulation
• Collections and Selection Sets
• Primitive Matching Patterns
• Scene Import
• SOP Import
• SOP Create
• Writing USD to Disk
• Import and Render with Karma

Also, don't forget to join our Reddit page and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram and Twitter, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.