Houdini Shaders production ready ?

[rob]

Whats the general feeling about the state of play with Houdini's production shaders out of the box ?. After really giving them a good look I am begining to think theres a bit of everything ie a lot of examples with a lot thats not quite finished ie the shader just does not quite have all the features to make it really usefull. Im just thinking If I start on a large project I'm going to have to spend a lot of time building shaders / re wiring etc .... . or just get a full time shader TD for quite a chunk of a project. !

R

Edited March 25, 2008 by rob

[anamous]

the shaders included with houdini (at least up to 9.1.x) are enough for simple usage - but nothing fancy. i see them more as examples of shading language capabilities and sometime they serve as a good starting point for own shaders. so the bad news is yes, if you intend to do anything serious in mantra, you will most probably find yourself creating shaders for it.

the good news is that it's pretty easy to write vex shaders (specially when you can start with something existing or connect a few vops), and IMO a rewarding process - you will find mantra an extremely capable engine. plus you end up with shaders specifically tailored to your needs.

[rdg]

I'd say it depends on what you are looking for.

I am often surprised to find after hours of starring at vex networks that the feature I am looking for is in the build in materials and shaders.

Don't let you fool by the material gallery - a lot of the shaders is still 'only' in /shop ... at least that's my impression.

On the other hand if you have a specific task and target, it is quite usefull to roll your own shaders that are optimized on what you want to do.