H16.5 displacement issue/Houdini bug?

[Baldric]

 

Hi everyone,

I am trying to find out how exactly to go about exporting procedural displacement patterns from within a material builder, that can then be used to augment or modify other displacement patterns going into other shaders. Somehow, however, whatever I try I cannot get it to work properly. It does not render the way it should. I do not want to use the layer struct for this, since I want to be able to extract only parts of the displacement texture and not the whole thing being used in my principled shader (inside the material builder). In my mind this should be an easy thing to do, so I am really wondering what I am doing wrong, or if it is actually a bug in Houdini? 

Either way I would really appreciate if someone would check out the attached hip file and analyse. Perhaps someone knows exactly what is going wrong?

Help is much appreciated.

Thanks,

Doug

 

shader_test_v002.hipnc

[LaidlawFX]

If you are going for a texture you can do these three methods:

You can assign those material connections in a constant shader, or just as a render passes, with bind vops or parameters, and apply it to a 1x1 UV'd grid, with orthographic camera.  

If you want it in the UV space of a model you can used the new bake rop, or the old mantra commands for it. 

Alternatively, you can make the pattern as a vop, and use that vop in a cops/vops network to save out a texture. 

Also if you are making vop hda, you can just set them up so they can be used for other shaders, like accepting the UV space externally, etc. 

[Baldric]

Hello LaidlawFX,

thank you so much for your comment and suggestions! I will definitely check out those options. However, for now I would really like to keep things as procedural as possible and the idea was actually to avoid using texture maps alltogether, keeping things completely procedural. I realize that this might slow rendering times perhaps, but rendering times is not really an issue at the moment. Do you have an idea, or a suggestion as to how to do this without baking out textures?

Thanks,

Doug

[LaidlawFX]

If you want to go third party use Substance, but I'm afraid there are not many ways to cross packages while keeping it procedural. You can go Houdini Engine if you want, but Substance is designed for keeping it procedural and communicating shaders across multiple packages.