BabaJ I find creating textures and working with them in Houdini more than adequate.
Well if you have some workflows to share or tutorials to reference I'd be happy to learn about them, I don't even see myself capable of generating a generic brick texture, let alone some fancy multi layer metal-rust-paint-scratches-reflection robot material.
Here is a cop2 network with a simple brick pattern made with vopcop.
Korny Klown2 I was rather shocked when I read here that SideFX dropped the shader view
I'll praface this by saying that I personally don't know anything much about material development. However, I'm quite curious about the corncern over dropping the Shader View tab. I don't know what it actually was, but it sounds like it could be replicated by placing down a shader ball, and maximizing a render region in the viewport.
Was there something more to it than that? If there was, it might or might not be that difficult to add. If there wasn't and it's just the setup that's a nuissance, it would probably be quite easy to add a shelf tool to set it up automatically. If it was faster to render than a render region, there might be some tricks we could use to make VEX/VOP-based displacements and other material effects work in the viewport itself for controlled cases like a shader ball.
(Also, sorry for jumping into an already-long thread. I hope that I'm not stirring anything up. I'm just curious.)
ndickson it sounds like it could be replicated by placing down a shader ball, and maximizing a render region in the viewport.
1. You need a light setup and camera too. And all this per material. 2. Don't want to clutter the scene with said elements. Setting up Mantra filters will be cumbersome and finding my shader dev spotlight is leaking into a render can be costly. 3. Don't believe any other app solves it this way, people have expectations, rather see Houdini not working against them to help attract newcomers.
Any shader preview should also allow fast output overrides via some new ‘display’ VOP flag. This way we can view a dot-product, noise or something without having to grab its output connection and haul-ass all the way over to the Ce bind-export (or float-to-vector before it)…
Korny Klown2 I want to create a brick texture…..well….no generic brick texture pattern available in cops, attempt over.
The idea that it needs to be “available in COPs” is flawed. For one thing, you have VOPCOPs which allows you to make any brick texture your heart desires because it gives you access to tons of patterns, noises and math nodes.
But also, you have height fields, and they can be brought into COPs very easily. You literally just need to point your COP node to the height field, press the buttons for matching resolution and channels, and you're done. This brings across any custom layers you make, so you're free to set up masks and curvature layers and colors and whatever else.
This is not to say that Houdini is perfect at this kind of thing. To be a match for Substance Designer, some streamlining by SideFX will need to take place. But pretty much all the tools are already there, it's only the workflow that's lacking a bit.
