luckymutt

Cool. Thanks for the reply.
I think I will make a digital asset for this. I'm kinda surprised there isn't something out of the box, but at least now I can get further into how other aspects of Houdini works

Lastly, do I need to use convert images for reflection to a *.rat file?
or can I use spherical or light probe HDRs?
I didn't see much info on the *rat format itself in the docs.

So here is what I have done:
Creating a plane, aligned it to the camera, pushed it back and parented it to the camera.
I added a UV Texture SOP and set it to Prespective From Camera, and I applied a Constant shader with my background footage.
Works well enough.

However, having to go through setting this up seems less than ideal, so I tried creating an environment box, setting a UV Texture SOP the same way, but the texture is not projecting properly at all, both with trying an EnvBox shader as well as with the Constant shader.
Any thoughts?
I can post another couple of renders if it will help.

ok. Cool. This is getting me closer to what I want and it is all making better sense. (This transition from Max-> Houdini has been interesting(and fun))
So here is the current set-up and problem, with the scene screen-shot posted above:
Glass and liquid with default glass and liquid shaders.
Environment light with a *.rat (made from a cross hdr) in the Area Map slot - this gives me the global reflections I am after.

Now I want to take an image sequence and place it in the background to get my refractions through the glass.
If I use an Environment Box, I can't seem to get a camera match.
I am using a 1.778 aspect ratio image as the background, and I am rendering off to the same.
Is there a method to do so?