davpe

hi, I can only repeat what I have said before. for texturing, use masks you get from heightfield erode, plus you can generate your own hi-res masks in shader using mesh masks with shader noises and position data. you can do full terrain texturing procedurally in Mantra. Of course it depends how much detail you need, how specific look you want and how much time you have. Using triplanar textures to finalize shading/displacement is a good idea. For general rock displacement detail Worley/Manhattan/Chebyshev noise patterns are good but it takes some practice to get to good results but you'll get great deal of flexibility and no tiling issues. Best for large areas. Otherwise triplanar projection of multiple sculpt maps is good too. Ideal is to use both. Painting huge textures is a bad idea in my opinion. Too much manual work, resources required for data handling, plus youre f*cked if somebody decides to make more significant changes to the terrain. Dunno what level of realism are you aiming at and whether you're pathtracing or using realtime engine. This may impact your workflow to some extent (Ive got minimal experience with realtime stuff). I personally never used LODs for this but I don't see any reason why you couldn't use it if you need it. \ cheers.

hi, here are some answers: as far as I am understand it heightfield will always have the same resolution across its entire area since it is a volume. so you shouldn't need to care about that (at least I've never noticed any resolution issues). when it comes to texturing, I wouldn't even think about using uvs and traditional approach of texturing things as that's very painful process for things like terrains (unles you have a very good reason to do so). what I am doing is just using various masks generated by erosion sim, combined with position based procedural patterns and running it through Mantra. to me, this procedural approach seem to be quite convenient and fast. if you need to, you can always bake into uv textures and export do different renderer/realtime engine. cheers.

I too was hoping for some Mantra/lighting updates as in some areas it's really needed. anyways, the new release still seems to bring enough goodies for everyone

i would just say these laptops are probably just fine for learning purposes but if you plan to actually doing some work with it then know it will only be good for non-demanding stuff. both 16 gigs of ram and 512 gb storage will run out as nothing.

Hey, these are my points of view: 1) and 2) i never use any of those tools (Light bank or Object appearance tab). there is not enough features to make either of them convenient to use. To me it feels like they started the idea of having a dedicated interface for managing lights and objects but then they never came back to make it really useful. However. If you want a comprehensive material assignment solution, you need to look into Material Stylesheets. That is something being actively developed and it represents the most versatile and powerful way for material assignments and overrides in your scenes. For managing your lights, there is unfortunately no interface other than Light bank. Personally, if I have a ton of lights in my scene I use combo Tree view (with lights filtered by name) and Parameters window and it just does the job for me so I'm not even missing Light bank kind of thing very much. 3) When I do terrains lookdev, I have actually always done it procedurally so far with Mantra without using any uvs. Anyways, if you scale uvs I think it is safer to do so in the shader so you can use the original uvs to actually paint a texture if needed. 4) never walked too far in realm of light shader writing but right now I'd say you can only do that in shop network (don't take this for granted thou) 5) previous answer already directed you the right way, I might add that (again) Material Stylesheets is something you may want to explore. The video posted by StepbyStep is very old, and although still valid in key things, material workflows have changed a bit since then. cheers.

for that you are supposed to use Layer Mix.

hm, not sure how to solve that... I always render to exr.

hard to say without seeing what are you actually doing. are any other layers baking out fine?

i don't know how to do it with groups but if you have packed geometry, at each iteration you can only keep the one you want and delete others (which is simple since packed geo is always represented by one point).

from the picture, I can also see you're using GGX specular distribution. that is the most noise prone specular you can have. Try using Phong. It may not give as plausible results but should reduce noise significantly and in most cases looks perfectly fine.

really hard to say without inspecting the hip file

also, thing with Mantra is that there is a great deal of render parameters that are not exposed (because there is a ton of it) and unfortunately some of them may impact the render time significantly. for new users this is not obvious and default values of some parameters should definitely be updated. for example, take a look at vm_samplecachesize (Sample Data Cache Size) - this is amount of ram dedicated for image sampling (I guess...), and something you definitely want to have at 2048 MB all the time and maybe even more for big scenes. it will not help you with noise but it can brutally slow down renders with lots of textures and displacements if you're leave it at default setting of 512 MB. all rendering parameters can be accessed through the little gear icon at the top right corner of parameter window. also, see the docs page: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/props/mantra.html Stochastic transparency can have an impact too. try to use the slider and bump it up to something ridiculous, like 128 (just to see if it has any effect). This parameter is exposed by default and is sitting at the mantra ROP in sampling tab all the way at the bottom. if this is on, separate sampling is used for transparency rays. most of the times, default value of 4 is fine but in some cases it can give quite noisy result and needs to be adjusted.

Not sure how much noise vs. render time are we talking about, but refraction rendering in Mantra is currently somewhat more noisy than competitive raytracers. I hope this issue to be addressed in upcoming Houdini release as that should be focused towards rendering (at least that's what I've heard). Right now, you have to bump up render samples to get rid of the noise. Note that you can manipulate direct and indirect samples separately (Quality multipliers on Mantra are only affecting indirect samples). Light samples should help too but beyond 3 samples it usually has no additional effect other than increasing render time. cheers.

No. It seems Material Palette connection to custom Gallery files is not working currently.

hi, maybe Partition SOP will help you: https://vfxbrain.wordpress.com/2017/09/15/groups-from-attribute/ if you've got your names ready it should be fairly easy...