shader dev. learning

[dark_cry]

Hi there, i'm new in Houdini and now 'm eating ton's of tutorials a day)). I'm so glad that have found out such a cool forum like odForce. I'm doing well in exploring the package. The only problem is that there almost no any advanced tutorials about shader development. i'm x maya user, so in maya shaders are given at a very top level. So for me it's very new to develop shader from scratch. Any suggestions how to learn this stuff????

[mightcouldb1]

Seriously your best bet is to look inside of the shaders in the material palette! They are all Shader Builders for the most part. Start with a simple surface shader and render with the micropolygon renderer. You can hook up anything to the Cf value, hit render and see what comes out. If you use interactive, you can get weird results when swapping connections(Houdini 11), so I suggest rendering the standard way.

I know that there is a 3DBuzz video on HDRI and shading, that might be something you'd like to check out.

[LaidlawFX]

When you get into PBR renders one of the undocumented things you should know Ce is the means of rendering a constant with PBR render engines. One of the things to take note of in a constant shader.

Also if you can figure out how the mantra surface model works you can get pretty far along. Building stuff up from scratch is a good method, but like it was said figuring out how the existing will take you far. If you back chase stuff from the ends, and delete sections that are not being used you can isolate what different sections of the code are doing.

If you can get your hand on h10 shaders they are more simple than the current shading model so you can back track how they work a little easier.

[jkunz07]

The shader view is also helpful for getting quick feedback on changes your making.

[dark_cry]

Thnx all for reply) learning with already built materials is a gd idea. I got one more question about it. Is the renderman shading pipeline same with mantra one?

[Erik_JE]

Stupid cellphone. Double post..

Edited April 18, 2012 by Erik_JE

[Erik_JE]

Thnx all for reply) learning with already built materials is a gd idea. I got one more question about it. Is the renderman shading pipeline same with mantra one?

Not the same but similar