Procedural Texture in Viewport

[michaelb-01]

I must be missing something but how can I create a shader with a procedural texture and view it in the viewport??? Do i have to create an GLSL shader?!

[jkunz07]

How ever your generating your procedural texture, you would have to port to GLSL.

[michaelb-01]

hm, seems mad it is that complicated just to see a procedural in the viewport..! Are there any examples of how to port it GLSL?

[mestela]

The other way is to copy your procedural textures into a vop network, create geo with lots of points, and send the texture results directly to Cd.

 

My understanding is that an automatic shader porting/recompile of vex to glsl has always been marked as not-easy and of low-priority, compared to what existing customers are asking for (better and faster fx generally).

 

I missed maya's viewport texture stuff to when I first used houdini, I barely even think about it now.

Edited May 19, 2015 by mestela

[jkunz07]

Adding some type of thumbnails or previews to vops would be very powerful, I think Houdini is that only 3d package that doesn't have a shader/material editor with it.

 

 

There is the shader view pane in Houdini but I think that's completely broken in H14 and was never particularly useful.

 

Doing the shading by copying and pasting the vop network as Matt mentioned is the best workflow but very painful as ramp parameters cannot be copied and carry their settings. There are also several bugs/UI issues that make rewiring vops painful especially with subnets resulting in lots of tedious re-wiring.

[anim]

don't forget that you have always ability to use render region or render view to interactively preview materials, shaders or individual textures

maybe not as userfriendly as thumbnails or viewport textures, but at least 100% accurate preview of anything you throw at mantra

as you can write your own procedural textures in VEX, even complex ones, that use pclouds or raytracing themselves, it may not be as easy to preview that in GLSL.

Instead of SESI spending their time on viewport textures I'd much rather see them optimizing interactive render speed (maybe as well GPU) so we may be able to use it as a viewport one day

[Mzigaib]

Adding some type of thumbnails or previews to vops would be very powerful, I think Houdini is that only 3d package that doesn't have a shader/material editor with it.

 

 

There is the shader view pane in Houdini but I think that's completely broken in H14 and was never particularly useful.

 

Doing the shading by copying and pasting the vop network as Matt mentioned is the best workflow but very painful as ramp parameters cannot be copied and carry their settings. There are also several bugs/UI issues that make rewiring vops painful especially with subnets resulting in lots of tedious re-wiring.

 

 

You can use COPs to build and visualize interactively any procedural texture you want in viewport with much more control than any shader panel I've seen! in this way you can, like Maya, bake any procedural texture that you want into bitmaps to visualize interactively in the viewport. I even use it to build and preview procedural textures for lights!

You don't need even have to copy the nodes from the COPS VOP context if you want, you can use the texture right away in the shader using simple link expressions, copying the nodes and paste into the shader is another way to go I do it when I need or feel the necessity to and I've never have any problems of re-wiring nodes pasting from COPs VOPs into the shader, the only extra work I have is to build the proper UI for the new parameters besides that you can build an asset to automatize the whole process if you want or you can even just link the parameters, bottom line you have options to explore but yeah you have to build them and for some I understand that it sucks but I prefer that than a blackbox that you are tied to and cannot change.

For me most of the times I don´t even feel the necessity to have a shader view or panel, in my experience they trick you most of the times, I don't trust them, for me the best way to see the shader in action imho is in the actual scene but that off course is me.

 

Cheers!

Edited May 22, 2015 by Mzigaib