Houdini packed instances to usd omniverse with attributes for the shader

Hi, I created a very simple example with a box copied to points as packed geometry with some color and custom attribute “v@myAtt” per instance, the geometry seems and attributes seem to pass just right, but I can use them on the shader in omniverse using the displayColor primvar, when I do the same but unpack and convert everything to geometry it works just fine.
I want to use the isntances because I’m planning in creating a complex scene, and I want to vary a bit the instances by changing the color in the shader with some custom attributes, also this attributes are animated through time

attributeToUsdInstance_test.hiplc (378.3 KB)

by the way, it seems to read the colorDisplay by default when I switch to the storm render

this is the houdini file looks like

this is omniverse, with the shader, but it seems to ignore the attribute when it comes from instances


I just find out when I switch to storm it seems to ignore my shader assigment but it uses the displayColor just like when I import everything unpacked

sorry for the spam, but I can only upload one image per post

Hello @maxmax003! I’ve reached out to the dev team for some help! We should hear back shortly!

Well, thank you, I still hasn’t being able to found a solution myself beside using the full geometry with no instances. I also tried to create the omni material in houidni, but I can’t connect any attributes to it

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Hello @maxmax003
Sorry for the late reply. This is an known issue, and we are activity working on a fix on the RTX side. I will update this thread once the fix is out.

A couple workaround is, if you really need to use RTX renderer, you can export the geometries as non-instanced, I know it can be heavy. You can fine tune some attributes, for example, only import attributes you are interested and set default values on non-timesampled attributes. This might reduce the scene size a lot if you have long running frames.
The other way is, as you described, temporary switching to Storm for instanced objects.
Screenshot 2022-10-27 160439

Thank you for reporting this issue!

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Well the storm reference was to point the values are coming across fine, is just the omniverse renderes that seems to ignore the attributes but storm is just a preview render. The idea is be able to vary the look of thousands of instances with attributes in the shader, I even had them animated over time so they are timedependent. I guess for the time being I’ll have to deal with huge files, and smaller scenes, hope this is on the roadmap to dev soon, let me know if there is a date for this. I’m just trying to move out of the other renderer options lke karma, arnold or redshift and even unreal because the speed gain is amazing. Thanks for the help

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@maxmax003
Thank you for reporting this issue. RTX renderer is currently not supporting per-instance primvars as @walai was mentioning. We are tracking this internally with ticket number OM-50979. We cannot say when the feature will be released but it does look to be on a scheduled release in the near future.

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rather already, please )


Another option is to use surface nurbs