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Hi. I came from maya and I lost a hypershade ( Materiel editor ) in Houdini. What should I do? Today, I downloaded a file from this great forum and I have the textures also; but the problem is I couldn't understand how many textures are used in the scene? Where are these textures. Some inside shops, others inside /obj/shopnets. Why I couldn't find a general, all in one place for this purpose?

Please excuse me if I bother you by asking stupid!!?? questions.

--

Farsheed.

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Hi. I came from maya and I lost a hypershade ( Materiel editor ) in Houdini. What should I do? Today, I downloaded a file from this great forum and I have the textures also; but the problem is I couldn't understand how many textures are used in the scene? Where are these textures. Some inside shops, others inside /obj/shopnets. Why I couldn't find a general, all in one place for this purpose?

Please excuse me if I bother you by asking stupid!!?? questions.

--

Farsheed.

I understand what you mean as I come from a Maya background as well. However after a while I came to see the houdini way of doing things is better. Having everything in one general place is actually a bad thing. For example: object A has got his materials in /shops, object B has got his material in /shops and object C has got his materials in shops - This would be similar to the Maya way of working... everything in one place -> /shops. The problem is what if in a different scene you have 500 different objects. That would imply 500 materials in /shops... start finding the right one to tweak... pretty chaotic.

So instead houdini uses digital assets. Everything related to that object is nicely wrapped up in it's own special file (generally people only wrap up one asset per library (eg: my_creature.otl) ). This means that all the shaders are also part of that package, on a more technical level this means that the paths to get to that shader need to be relative to the digital asset. For example the entire path would be: /obj/my_creature1/shopnet1/creature_material whereas the relative path would be: ../shopnet1/creature material.

So if we were to have 500 different of these assets in a scene and we wanted to change the material on one of them, you know where the material resides ( /obj/my_creature1/shopnet1/creature_material ) and you can easily edit it by unlocking the asset, making the change and locking the asset again. When another artists adds that creature asset to his scene, the changes will have been made and he will get the updated version. You can edit the asset in a seperate scene without having to load up the heavy scene that also has all the other creatures in them.

That is why materials are not "in one place", however they are in the same context. They will always be in the Shop context and to edit materials on a deeper level you will go into the vop context. The "material editor" does not exist in the same way as in Maya, you have the material palette which will let you pick some materials from presets and the parameter view which will allow you to change their parameters. As mentioned before, for deeper editing of the materials you will need to dive into the material in the shop context and then into the vop context - wherever these contexts' are for the object you are working on (either in /shops or in My_Asset/shopnets).

Hope this helps a bit.

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Hi. I came from maya and I lost a hypershade ( Materiel editor ) in Houdini. What should I do? Today, I downloaded a file from this great forum and I have the textures also; but the problem is I couldn't understand how many textures are used in the scene? Where are these textures. Some inside shops, others inside /obj/shopnets. Why I couldn't find a general, all in one place for this purpose?

Please excuse me if I bother you by asking stupid!!?? questions.

--

Farsheed.

Open a Tree View (Space+W in Network View for example), select SHOP filter icon from above, and you'll see all materials in a scene in one shot. Select any of them to jump between networks. Similarly Material Pallete gathers for you all materials. Keeping all of them in one network wouldn't be very practical, although it's possible.

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