May 25, 2025 8:59 PM
Nov 28, 2025 6:01 AM

Octane Sink

Useful notes, tips & tricks regarding the Octane renderer for Houdini

Info

The main focus is Houdini Solaris integration

· #note/sink ·

Attributes

Reading Houdini attributes

Vertex Float Attribute
Vertex Color Attribute

Passing attributes to geo/instances

Rename the Texture Instance node to displayColor to get instance color attribute.

Source

Limitations

At the moment you can have only up to 4 float attributes and 2 color attributes
Octane will read the first 4/2 attributes (in their name alphabetical order) and will default the rest.
This is not a Solaris limitation but Octane's.

Source: Developers

Motion Blur

If you see the hair lag after the geo this is the motion blur problem
For hair motion blur the v attribute is required

Agents hair motion blur under investigation, currently does not work!

The Octane Render Settings motion blur toggle acts weird, easier to disable motion blur by setting the camera shatter start/end to zeroes.

Volumes

Setting up the volumes render in current versions is way less comfortable than in SOP version of Octane (even the SOPs experience of the Solaris plugin is way less polished).

Use File Cache node to export to vdb sequence from SOPs, explicitly set the file to VDB. Load the volume using Volume LOP.

Rendering a Density grid is straightforward, but to get other volume grids into Octane it's required to use Render Geometry Settings node. To get the Blackbody emission you have to specify the emission grid manually as Temperature in the Octane tab of the node. Changes to Render Geometry Settings also require a render restart.

Velocity grid must be vector, use VDB vector from scalar node to merge separate velocities.