Follow-up: Texture Lookdev with USD (Patreon)

I wanted to make a quick update to my last article. Towards the end I mentioned the possibility of using Houdini's included build of usdview and gaining access to the speed of Karma XPU.

I've got good news and bad news.

The good is that Houdini comes with a copy of uic that lets us compile mainWindowUI.ui with the correct Qt version. It's also easy to drop in the added lines to Houdini's appController.py. In short, making our UI customizations is no problem.

The bad news is that Karma is horrible when it comes to picking up on updated textures. It's a bad situation in Solaris and sadly that carries over to usdview. No amount of stopping and starting renders or swapping to different renderers reliably gets Karma to see a texture update. Sometimes it does, often it doesn't. It must be doing some sort of caching behind the scenes that is buggy at best.

It's too bad because Karma XPU is indeed very fast. Maybe the bugs will be ironed out eventually...