Reference Display Options (3D viewer)

Choose the type of geometry to apply the display options to.

Displays unselected geometry points in blue (unselected)/yellow (selected).

Displays the index of each point in blue (unselected)/cyan (selected). Numbers start at 0.

If the point has a normal attribute, displays the point normal. A normal specifies the direction in which a point or surface faces. To change existing point normals, use the Point SOP.

Displays the UV texture coordinates at each point. UV coordinates determine the placement of textures.

Displays the XYZ coordinates for each point. This option can clutter the display quickly on complex geometry. If you need it, you may want to only activate it for selected geometry (see the use of the All/Non-selected pop-up menu above).

Displays the hulls of NURBS, Bezier surfaces, curves, and metaballs.

This option is useful when there are a large number of such objects that fill the screen. Displaying hulls and hiding the actual geometry reduces the visual clutter, and speeds up the display.

Displays the number of each primitive in violet, starting at 0. Primitives include ellipses, metaballs, tubes, meshes, particle systems, NURBS, and polygons.

Displays spline edit points. This helps you build very clean skinned surfaces by minimizing isoparms by lining up edit points on the cross-sections.

Displays the normal (in pink) for primitives that have normals (primitives such as spheres, cylinders, and metaballs do not have normals).

Displays selected profiles (that is, profiles that are themselves selected. Profiles on selected surfaces are not automatically shown).

It can be useful to turn off display of profiles after a boolean operation (for example, the Surfsect SOP) to avoid cluttering the display with profiles that appear to float in space after the trim.

Displays the index of profile curves. The profile index is always prefixed by the primitive number of the profile’s parent surface, For example, “0.2” for the third profile of first primitive (since numbering starts at 0) in the geo detail.

Displays the number of each vertex in violet (unselected)/pink (selected), starting at zero.

Displays the UV texture coordinates for each vertex (if coordinates exist) in violet (unselected)/pink (selected). UV coordinates determine the placement of textures.

(Only applicable to the UV Editor.)

Back facing polygons in the viewport are drawn filled to distinguish them from front facing polygons.

This is actually a pop-up menu that lets you choose a shading mode in which the given type of geometry will be drawn. For example, you can have normal geometry drawn smooth shaded and templated geometry drawn in wireframe.

Displays a small gnomon in the bottom left corner of the view, showing the current orientation of the world axes.

Displays a gnomon at the world-space origin (0,0,0). (See also how to display an object’s origin/pivot .)

Displays gnomons at the origins of particle systems. If the particle system’s Display Particle Axes option is on, and the particles have a center of mass attribute (com), this will show the center of mass.

Displays object names or object paths.

Overlays rectangles showing the video “safe area” for picture and titles (the area in which the picture and titles (text) will be visible and undistorted on most TVs).

Displays a “field guide”, a traditional cell-animation tool that overlays a grid to help align elements by eye and provide points of reference between frames.

Controls the display of the view mask and overlay specified by the camera.

Displays a 20 unit by 20 unit grid on the XZ, XY, or YZ plane, centered at the origin.

Controls the display of node guide geometry.

Controls the display of node handles.

Controls whether the viewport automatically turns on certain display options based on the component selection type. For instance, point markers will be automatically turned on when picking points.

Controls the display of the IK critical zone guide geometry for bones.

Displays objects and geometry in the current object.

Displays the selected SOP in the current object when different from the display SOP

Displays templated geometry.

Displays nodes with the selectable template flag enabled.

Name of the viewport.

Orthographic or Perspective.

Displays the viewport’s name in its top left corner.

Displays the name of the camera if the viewport is looking through a camera .

Displays the name of the current tool (if any) in the viewport’s top right corner.

Increases or decreases the display resolution of Metaballs, NURBS, and Bezier surfaces.

Sets the ratio of width divided by height.

When looking through a camera, there is a mask applied to the areas that aren’t going to be rendered. This option controls the opacity of that mask.

For example, a very low value would display a transparent mask; a medium value would display a gray mask; and a high value would display a black mask.

Allows you to choose the display mode of stereo images in MPlay. You can choose between Anaglyph, Horizontal Interlace, or Horizontal Interlace (Reverse).

Displays a bitmap image as the background for viewports. This can be useful for tracing over a sketch or reference image (rotoscoping). For more on rotoscoping in Houdini see rotoscoping and the Roto parameters in the Camera object.

Choose between a light gray or black background color.

Choose lines (the length of the line indicates the velocity of the particle), points, or sprites (choose a Sprite POP to specify the sprite).

Sorts sprites based on their distance from the camera.

The size in pixels of particle points.

Displays textures on geometry. Turning this option off will increase display speed.

Displays all layers of multi-layered textures. Turning this option off will increase display speed.

When this option is on spotlights are represented as textured maps projected from a light. When this option is off Houdini uses GL spotlights. GL spotlights light per-vertex, so you must have very detailed geometry or the spot will appear blocky.

Like Transparency, this is a multi-pass solution with one drawing pass per spotlight in the scene.

This option uses texture mapping when available. Machines without hardware texture-mapping will slow noticeably.

If the Light object has the Projector Map parameter set in its Shading tab, the map will be used when this option is enabled.

This option does not work in conjunction with transparency or particle alpha.

Turning this checkbox on will display shadows in the viewport. In order for this to do anything, you must have lights set up in your scene with shadows turned on.

Displays specular highlights on geometry during Gouraud shading.

Displays transparency, including point attributes, texture pixels, or materials with alpha less than 1.

Houdini does not automatically sort of geometry. You may need to sort the objects manually in the scene hierarchy list. You may also need a Sort SOP at the end of the object’s geometry chain.

When this option is on, selected components are drawn filled with the selection color. You can turn this option off to be able to see an object’s texture when it is selected.

Automatically detects the attribute type in a UV texture editor viewport using the current Display SOP.

When Auto Detect Attribute Type is off, you can manually specify the attribute type for a UV texture editor viewport using these controls.

Increases or decreases the length of displayed normals. This is useful to increase the size of normals when you are zoomed out to view a large object, or decrease the size of normals when you are zoomed in on a small object.

Draws normals thicker on selected objects.

Increases or decreases the size of UV grips in a UV texture editor viewport.

Draws UV grips thicker on selected objects in a UV texture editor viewport.

Allows you to use an attribute other than Cd as your color. For example, if you set it to temperature, you will get a false color map of your temperature attribute.