I am not new to Houdini, but new to 16 & the Principled Shader. I am trying out this method of plugging in a noise or pattern into the base color of the principled shader directly however very few patterns actually work and so far I haven't gotten any 3D noise to apply successfully. Is there something I'm missing? Seems simple enough but no luck getting it to work.

Example:

Unified Noise > Base Color Input of Principled Shader - object fails to show noise pattern.

Cellular Noise > Base Color Input of Principled Shader - object successfully shows noise pattern.

Thanks

What did you connect to the position input of the pattern/noise? Most nodes in houdini require an input space to generate a pattern. Some nodes have "implied inputs', such as surface color, embedded within to provide an input when one is not connected, but this is limits the scope of usability to the network where that input type is well defined. Since position is defined differently in different contexts, nodes that require a position input (noise) do not have a default connection to keep the node as general as possible.

Try connecting either a ‘rest position’ vop, or transform global ‘P’ from current to object, and connect the output of the transform vop to the pos input of the unified noise.