procedural texturing

[Xyz]

Hello

I know maya pretty well. I am big fan of procedural textures also. In maya, I usually create layered textures and put them some noises, ramps etc. You all know that is really simple and powerful tool. I am lookin' easy way to make such a "simple" procedural textures in houdini. Do you know how? Do I need to make shaders and controlers for them to achive procedural textures?

[Annon]

Jump into SHOPs, lay down a "Material Shader Builder", inside make a "Surface Model" to get a base for your shader and hook it up. From there you can create a procedural texture by adding, mutiplying, subtracting different pattern nodes together and sticking them into the diffuse colour of the surface model, or wherever you want to put them.

I'd create a rest attribute in SOPs and us the SHOPs rest node to stop your textures from swimming. Don't forget you're in a different space in SHOPs, so use a transform node and set it to "From Current to World" if you're using world space rest values for your noise patterns.

Hope that helps

Christian

[symek]

I may not fully understand what kind of problem you see here. Maybe you should start with something like your favorite material in Maya and recreate it in Houdini asking questions along the way?

Houdini VOPs/VEX is definitely lower level type of shader builder, also it may not have some built-in patterns you're familiar with, but as it comes from a renderman procedural shading concept, it is procedural shading system par excellence, isn't it?

Things which are rather tedious is when you want to layer existing materials, because the only way to do this, is to copy what's inside them mix them in a single material Shop. Easy for basic stuff, not so easy and definitely not comfortable for advance materials. You have ramps, geometry attributes, plenty of patterns, 3d textures and so on. What kind of effects you're interested in?

[Xyz]

I may not fully understand what kind of problem you see here. Maybe you should start with something like your favorite material in Maya and recreate it in Houdini asking questions along the way?

Houdini VOPs/VEX is definitely lower level type of shader builder, also it may not have some built-in patterns you're familiar with, but as it comes from a renderman procedural shading concept, it is procedural shading system par excellence, isn't it?

Things which are rather tedious is when you want to layer existing materials, because the only way to do this, is to copy what's inside them mix them in a single material Shop. Easy for basic stuff, not so easy and definitely not comfortable for advance materials. You have ramps, geometry attributes, plenty of patterns, 3d textures and so on. What kind of effects you're interested in?

Thanks for replies guys.

First of all - for now I am not interested in VEX and VOPs, I will care about it in near future, but not now.

I will try to explain it with some example: lets say I want to use Mantra Surface [it seems to be really general shader - for me it is enough for now]. I want to use let say some ramp which is going from pure white to noise green and red color. How to achive that? I see I have to learn VOPs/VEX to be able to do this, yep?

[Stalkerx777]

Thanks for replies guys.

First of all - for now I am not interested in VEX and VOPs, I will care about it in near future, but not now.....

VOPs is the only way to get what you want..

You can also make patterns in COPs, and the use op: operator to reference them in shader.

[Annon]

Well I'd play in SHOPs so you're not reliant on how dense your geo is, but it's exactly the same, just working at rendertime. But yeah, you should start to use VOPs all the time anyway...

@SYmek: I recently had two shaders for two different organic objects, they then merged and exploded, so wanted to blend the shaders in some way. I found the same as you that I had to copy the tree of each shader and stick it into a new one then do a mix between the two. It worked really well, but I would have thought there would be a way of merging bits out of other shaders instead of having to copy the whole lot, doesn't seem very Houdini to me...

Christian

[jkunz07]

http://houdiniadventures.blogspot.com/2008/03/more-shader-experiments.html

That link might help you transition from maya, it discusses 3dsMax procedural equivalents, but it might give you a better idea of the tools Houdini has to create procedural shaders.