Houdini 20.5 Nodes VOP nodes

Material shader builder VOP node

A higher-level shader that can contain one or more sub-shaders, such as surface shaders, displacement shaders, and rendering properties.

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Since 16.0

Overview

The Material node is a container for other shader types, letting you “package up” combinations of lower-level shaders (such as surface shaders and displacement shaders) with individual settings into a new “look” you can assign as a single unit.

It is necessary for some nodes to specify the context in which they belong.

  • Global VOP provides global variable for the specified context type.

  • Output VOP provides output variables to assign for the specified context type. The material knows which shader types the network implements by inspecting the context type for the Output VOPs.

  • Parameter VOP specifies the context in which it exports the variable, if it is indeed exporting at all.

Creating and editing materials

To...Do this

Create a new Material from scratch

In the network editor, Go to the /shop level, create “Shading Network” node and double-click the node to go inside. Create “Material Builder” node and go inside. Create and edit shader building-block nodes inside the material and connect them to the special “suboutput” node.

Override a material’s settings per-object or per-primitive

See rendering properties.

Tip

Time is the motion blur shutter time for the shader execution, which is a value between 0 to 1 for shader motion blur (it’s not the same as $T). Time is initialized to 0 for micropolygon rendering, since all shading occurs at the start of the frame. To use Time for motion blur calculations, you’ll need to render with the ray tracing engine which executes shaders once for every pixel sample.

VOP nodes