I would like to know if side fx are planning to make it possible to view textures in the viewport.

Making textures in houdini using redshift is extremely slow because you have to render to see the texture you have created.

You can't even get a hint of what a texture might look like in the material editor.

You can not drag images in straight from explorer.

Materials really do make or break any scene so I would like to know why side fx have neglected this vital and very basic functionality?

How do you guys make your materials?

Moin, anonymous user,

you are mixing a couple of different things here.

First, SideFX is not responsible for an external renderer to be well integrated into their software. That is up to the makers of that external renderer (yes, I don't even mention its name, so bad is my mood about it). There are several ways to show texture files you use in external renderers, just do a google or search on this forum: They may not be pretty/easy to set up, but it definitely is possible.

As for drag and drop: I would like better native UXP myself, unfortunately, Houdini is a Qt application, which tries hard to be as strange as possible (across all platforms). I have seen a script presented that adds some fundamental d&d support: - you may have to adjust it to work under recent Houdini versions.

Material previews in (whatever) Material editor would definitely be a nice thing, but with so many different renderers being available I can understand that this is not a focus for development at all. A “WYSIWYG” material editor for the renderer you mention would be possible to create, but doing so would require enough copies to be sellable - which renders it (pun intended) quite unlikely to happen “just like so”.
A quick search using a search engine brought up at least two videos:




If you stick to Houdini's built-in renderer(s), things are definitely easier, which honestly is the best you can expect from any 3d suite.

Marc

P.S. as for the question about how I manage my materials: I write my own wysiwyg-material-editors when I need them.

The add-ons that Marc described are a good solution. I do wish that 3rd party render companies had a more clever way to go about tapping into the OCL viewport display like for instance interfacing directly with something like the SideFX LABS PBR Shader or QuickMaterial nodes.

Moin! malbrecht


Indeed I've seen the videos you posted. The first one seems great until you try to use it and then everything goes black like this

The second one is absolutely ridiculous. How can an artist get any momentum when having to deal with that?


There is also this one that ignores uv mapping so…. Why bother with that if it's not going to render how it looks in the viewport?
https://elmar-glaubauf.at/2020/03/17/egredshifttools-v0-1-2-released/ [elmar-glaubauf.at]


Myself (and I'm sure many others) use redshift because it's fast and looks fantastic. I don't have a render farm, I don't have a TD to build tools for me and I'm sure a lot of people are in the same boat.

There seems to be a huge wave of new users who would really appreciate SideFX and Redshift to work together to give us what we need to create beautiful art with maximum productivity!!


Forget these scripts, might as well just do a render! And I'm back where I started….

Anonymous user,

> How can an artist get any momentum … ?

… I don't know. I don't do art and have never understood artists.
I consider Houdini a TOOL, not something that works “magically”.

> There seems to be a huge wave of new users who would really appreciate SideFX and Redshift to work together

You mean the “huge wave” that the render-guys you mention would love you to imagine? Yes … I have heard of that animated crowd. Doesn't look very real to me though.

Let me phrase it slightly different to my previous suggestion:
Houdini is constantly evolving (you may call it “changing”). Scripts that worked one or two major releases before may or may not work today. Being a tool, not a magic wand, you will have to adjust scripts that worked for an older version if they stop working for you today. Getting HELP with that is what this forum is pretty good at. Providing you with a ready-made solution *might* be something you want to hire someone for. Sometimes you get served that here, too. Sometimes you have to work for it.

Sorry, but your attitude makes me regret stepping in. I sincerely apologize for having wasted your time, obviously.

Marc

redshift material viewport representation is not only a houdini problem…also in maya vp2.0 it is not really (fully) supported…

but if you search the redshift-forum, there are some tools (hda) for houdini, to setup rs material builder also show up textures in viewport….

hope this helps.

Sorry Marc I think I've been locked inside too long

You didn't wasted my time at all, I needed to know the best ways of viewing textures and now I know so thank you for your time.