Understanding Houdini Lights

[Drughi]

Hi!

I'm trying to understand how houdini lights work. Normally you can jump almost in every node and see how it works. If i jump in the light I only see the visualizers!? and constraints. I know there is the lightshader, but where is it applied?

where does the magic happen?

Edited November 29, 2018 by Drughi

[Hazoc]

All of the light presets have the "uber" ASAD Lights shader bind to them by default. You can find ASAD Light in the SHOP context. If you right-click the ASAD node and select "Type Properties" and open the Code tab you'll find the lights shader code for all the standard lights in one shader.

You can override this shader by attaching the "shop_lightpath" rendering property to a standard light object and set it to point to your own light shader. You can create light shaders with Light Shader builder in SHOP for example. Remember that light and shadow shaders are two separate things and sometimes you need to create the both. In this case you'd also attach the "shop_shadowpath" rendering property and set you shadow shader as well.