Day 04

Googled on "Houdini's Material Shader Builder"
Here are the info from Houdini 11 Documentations.

New material workflow

• A material is now a SHOP containing a VOP network with multiple output nodes for the different contexts. This lets you share parts of the network between different contexts.

  The old material-as-subnetwork workflow is still available as a SHOP subnetwork, however we recommend using the new Material shader builder SHOP since it is much more powerful and flexible.

• New Properties VOP allows you to add properties inside of a Material shader builder SHOP to support the new material workflow.

• New delayed load procedural VOP lets you to add render procedurals to support the revised material workflow.

• New Collect VOP collects the results of the Output VOPs for the different contexts in the Material shader builder SHOP network.

• New Switch VOP lets you switch between results of different Output VOPs in a Material shader builder SHOP network.

• You can compile VOP shader networks into VEX SHOPs or digital assets.

New surface model VOP

• The Surface model VOP provides advanced, ready-to-use, production-quality surface shading, with support for per-light exports, physically accurate subsurface scattering, energy conservation, reflections, refractions, fresnel, and more. The surface model VOP works with all Mantra render engines (raytrace, micropolygon, and PBR).

• The new surface model is the basis for new, more flexible materials in the material gallery.

  Older materials have been removed, but can still be loaded from older versions of Houdini. Going forward we plan to replace the old gallery with new materials based on the surface model VOP.

I decided to start building my own using "Material Shader Builder" and "surfaceModel" as the main body which offered the parameters I wanted to incorporate in the fluid shader I am making.

Only added a "Specular" node but little confused between the specular in "surfaceModel" & "Specular". It seems to offer more parameters. Promoted the parameters I find useful such as Diffuse Colour, Reflection Intensity, Refraction Intensity, IOR and SSS.





















Forums:












Found people discussing about a displacement shader named "choppyWater", felt it could be useful. Mr Ron demonstrate on how it can be used for displacing and even animate the noise.

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/12439-question-about-houdini-choppywater-displacement-shader/

While exploring odforce.net, I came across someone else's problem with exporting passes. I knew the solution after watching Peter Quint's videos on Surface Shader, wasn't expecting my first post to to be giving solution to someone, very nervous about giving a lousy or wrong information. Gave it a shot anyway.

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/12792-reflection-and-diffuse-from-bg-geo-using-pbr/

Questions:

- "Surface Shader Builder" & "Material Shader Builder" in shop context, it was said on the forum they are PBR and non-PBR respectively. But "Material Shader Builder" actually has a BSDF output in it which is used for PBR, confused.

- Why are we normalising "Normal" and "Incident" vectors?

Normalised Normal means it's length is '1', like a unit vector. Makes all the normals on the model equals to '1'.

- How to preview my shader with different geometry and backgrounds?

Use "Shader View"

- Using "Float to Vector"

There are cases where you might want to feed a float output into a vector input, inorder to do that, you have to use "Float to Vector". There are a lot more of conversion in Tab Menu > Convert category.

Tips:

- Combining 2 shaders into a Subnetwork

Select them > Shift + C
This was done to "Surface Shader Builder" & "ChoppyWater" during the demonstration.

- Viewing thumbnails in open browsers

Edit > Pref > General UI > check "Show image for image files in browser"