Does anyone have any good tutorials on creating procedural textures / procedurally coloring models in Houdini?

I come from a Maya background, from which most of my textures were created by node networks in hypershade.

It seems like I should be able to get similar result using VOPS / VEX in Houdini.

I am looking to create repeating patterns like the treads on a car tire, Celtic knots, fractal patterns like tiger stripes. These patterns tend to have mathematical basis so it seems like it should be possible to create them procedurally.

Any links or words of wisdom would be greatly appreciated!

Hey,

I come from Maya background also. Houdini can do everything the Hypershade can and much more. You just need to learn how houdini thinks.

If your talking about procedural patterns in the rendering context…
lay down a material shader builder (inside of a shopnet) and dive inside.
hit tab and look under patterns..
You can build up your shader network here, in the same way you would do inside of the hypershade.

if your talking about procedural patterns in the geometry (sop) context…
lay down a vop and check out the patterns in that.

Houdini is lower level than Maya, therefore requires a deeper understanding of 3d.. but once you get over that learning curve .. you'll never want to work in Maya again

Thanks for the pointers!

Having dived in and played around, it is is quite a bit like hypershade!

There is some next level stuff in there as well, it seems like I have a lot to learn!

and also, houdini does have a full compositor inside of it where you can create procedural textures, which can then be referenced by your materials. Do a search for COP networks or compositing on the help to get more info. Trust me, there is plenty in there to do it all

Thanks, getting into it!

Don't forget about the “Shader View” pane; I'll execute your shader code interactively. It's a little underpowered for full shader development (that's when you switch to Render View / IPR rendering) but it might be pretty useful for the type of pattern-generated functions you're talking about, especially if you can visualize them better when lit and displaced, as opposed to, say, looking at displacement maps as images in COPs.

Thanks for the pointer. It reminds me of Maya's hyper shade preview swatches.

Does anyone have any links to “next level” shading tutorials / blogs?.
It's really helpful to see / reverse engineer the sort of tricks that higher level users use.