Procedural texturing heavy meshes

[Procedural Nic]

Hi Everyone!

Newish to Houdini and trying to see how far I can push inside Houdini alone, without having to leave the interface.

I am trying to find out if there is a way to achieve a workflow I have in mind. Not asking for hip files, just a nudge in the right direction, so please have a read.

So here we go..

 

I use the VOP cop 2 generator a lot, and have been able to use it to generate a lot of varied textures and patterns - ok done!

I've use Attibute VOPS and Point VOPS in SOP level a lot to create similar and very interesting effects on geometry level - ok done!

 

Lets use the image I have attached as a reference. This coral scene I created  was made with particles - vdb - polygon. The "texturing" was done with one Attr VOP after the mesh was heavily subdivided. Now the cool thing here is that I

did this whole thing in two hours and never even had to think of UV unwrapping or any of that boring stuff, but at the cost that - this scene is divided into three meshes, each caching near 1gb per frame (in the event I wanted to animate it).

And I would like to add much more detail and my 8gb VRAM is chugging already. So, COPS won't work and I'll need to unwrap the mesh, and VOPS isn't all that sustainable. It's a good time to add that I am trying to stay away from VEXpression and coding for now,

i am rendering with redshift and realise that houdini has many native tools, but redshift doesn't support it!?

 

Basically I as I am typing this I am realising my own answer but hoping there is another way I am missing. In the SHOP context VEX builder, I find everything I want, patterns, noise etc, but in MAT context VEX builder and more specifically for redshift, i don't.

Like C4D users, I just want to procedural create textures, either without having to subdivide the mesh into oblivion, or unwrap. Am i crazy (read - lazy)?  And to clarify, I understand the UV layout process for manual texturing (previous 10 years Maya user), but that's not what  we are talking about here

 

Thanks in advance for reading my essay, I look forward to any replies, feedback.

 

Cheers

Nix

 

 

 

 

[Drughi]

Why not bake it? You will need uvs. But once you have them - Houdini has an awesome bake function.

No need for complex uvs and selecting uv-seams. Just use auto-seam.
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/uvautoseam.html

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/out/baketexture.html

[konstantin magnus]

Hi Nicolas,

we had a similar discussion a while back:

https://forums.odforce.net/topic/43213-biological-modelling-methods/?tab=comments#comment-204915

 

 

[Procedural Nic]

Thanks @konstantin magnus and @Drughi for your replies.

 

@Drughi i've had a look into baking previously, and it definitely has it's pro's, but not as interactive as I would like it to be. But will look into this again with fresh eyes this week, and post some results.

@konstantin magnus seems there is more than one Nicolas in Berlin looking for the same thing. Maybe I should organise a Berlin meetup for Houdini artists who don't like manual texturing! haha.

Thank you for your link, it will be absorbed this week, and hopefully there are workflows that transfer over to redshift.

It's a shame that all those nodes and functions are not supported in redshift (vex for 3rd party render, i know). I just find it hard to believe that all those sweet nodes are there for mantra, cops, vops, but not for redshift, wishful thinking..

 

alos found this thread..

https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/54981/

 

 

[konstantin magnus]

10 minutes ago, Procedural Nic said:

Maybe I should organise a Berlin meetup for Houdini artists who don't like manual texturing! haha.

Just in case you didn't know, there is a BHUG already: https://www.meetup.com/Berlin-Houdini-User-Group/

Not sure whether its currently active though..

[flcc]

We can understand that the redshift team can't rebuit the toolsets of every DCC they support, Although they did it with c4d noise (but now they are  same compagny this makes things easier).

But I'm hoping that their future osl implementation can make it easier to more or less adapt these toolsets. (dev team or users)

 

[davpe]

hi,

a bit late to the party, but here is my take on this.

i do majority of my texturing directly in Mantra shader netwroks and it's great. in terms of procedural stuff, Mantra by far outperforms any other renderer. Redshift is great for many reasons, but it's not for it's texturing capabilities, and I doubt it ever will be - nobody seems to be adding texturing tools to their renderers, beyond the most basic stuff like perlin noise or a curvature shader. Redshift, Vray, Octance have very limited texture handling capabilities, Arnold also very limited but offers a few very handy nodes, Renderman is the only 3rd party renderer that offers sort of an advanced procedural toolkit - but even thou I think it's a way behind Mantra in this respect.

So Mantra for me works basically like a texturing application that does all the heavy lifting, collects and manipulates all the data from other applications, assembling the final result and then, optionaly, bakes the stuff out to bitmaps for use with 3rd party renderers. Love it. I very much hope we'll be able to use the same (or updated) workflows in Karma soon.

cheers, D.

[criadontas]

On 3/7/2020 at 1:06 PM, davpe said:

hi,

a bit late to the party, but here is my take on this.

i do majority of my texturing directly in Mantra shader netwroks and it's great. in terms of procedural stuff, Mantra by far outperforms any other renderer. Redshift is great for many reasons, but it's not for it's texturing capabilities, and I doubt it ever will be - nobody seems to be adding texturing tools to their renderers, beyond the most basic stuff like perlin noise or a curvature shader. Redshift, Vray, Octance have very limited texture handling capabilities, Arnold also very limited but offers a few very handy nodes, Renderman is the only 3rd party renderer that offers sort of an advanced procedural toolkit - but even thou I think it's a way behind Mantra in this respect.

So Mantra for me works basically like a texturing application that does all the heavy lifting, collects and manipulates all the data from other applications, assembling the final result and then, optionaly, bakes the stuff out to bitmaps for use with 3rd party renderers. Love it. I very much hope we'll be able to use the same (or updated) workflows in Karma soon.

cheers, D.







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As you mentioned, different renderers have varying strengths and weaknesses when it comes to texturing and procedural effects. While Mantra excels in this area, other renderers may be preferred for different reasons such as speed or integration with specific software or pipelines.

Edited October 26, 2023 by criadontas