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.

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.

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).

Applies gamma correction to the beauty pass of the viewport, which contains only user-generated geometry. Guides, handles and other visual aids are not affected.

Applies a LookUp Table (LUT) to the beauty pass, after gamma is applied.

The gamma correction and LUT are applied to the background image in addition to the beauty pass.

Enables high-quality display of the viewport by smoothing jagged edges of lines and polygons. Increasing this setting will proportionately increase the amount of framebuffer memory used. 4x and 8x modes should only be used if the graphics memory installed on the graphics card is 1GiB or higher.

Removes jagged edges of lines from wireframe models and guides with a smaller performance hit than using Scene Antialiasing. See also, the Draw Lines Smoothly option in the General User Interface section of the Main Preferences window.

Enables High Dynamic Range (HDR) rendering which produces higher quality results for volumes and transparency. It can also be used in

superwhite values. If enabled, HDR images are render to flipbooks. Enabling this option doubles the framebuffer size.

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 multiple texture layers are present, but only the first layer will be displayed.

When this option is on spotlights render their projected maps in the viewport.

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

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

This option will not light transparent objects or volumes with the projected texture; they will render as if this option is off.

Increase the quality of displayed textures by producing a mipmap for enhanced filtering. Without mipmapping, textured objects will sparkle when viewed at a smaller scale. Enabling this option will cause textures to use 50% more graphics memory.

Specifies the level of anisotropic texture filtering to use. Higher values increase the quality of textured objects when a surface is nearly parallel to the view direction. This has the effect of sharpening textured objects in this case. The level represents the maximum number of texture samples to filter, and will slightly slow performance as it is increased.

Use per-pixel shading instead of per-vertex shading, enable OGL shaders and enables the use of almost all the Lighting and Transparency effects. A default GLSL shader is used on all geometry that does not have an OGL shader explicitly assigned as a Material. The default shader supports diffuse, specular, bump, normal and reflection maps (found in the SHOP/OGL rendering parameters in Edit Rendering Parameters for the SHOP). Enabling this option incurs a slight performance penalty which may be significant on lower-end graphics hardware.

Draw objects with per-pixel alpha, texture maps with alpha or material transparency using alpha blending (via an over operation). When off, pixels with non-zero alpha are drawn and zero alpha pixels are discarded. The quality of the transparency can also be selected, with the higher quality options impacting performance.

When this option is on, selected components are drawn filled with the selection color when in Smooth Wire Shaded display mode. You can turn this option off to see an object’s shading clearly when components are selected.

Displays specular highlights on geometry in Smooth Shaded modes. Light objects can individually disable specular lighting, and both options must be on in order to see specular highlights.

Area and environment lights are rendered with more accurate representations. Spotlight falloff and ramp-based attenuation are also incorporated into the shading. This mode attempts to closely match the results seen in mantra at the expense of performance.

The number of samples to use when rendering area and environment lights in High Quality Light Shading mode. It is ignored when this mode is not active. Higher numbers produce more accurate results, at a slight performance hit.

Enable Screen-space Ambient Occlusion, which shadows objects based on the amount of ambient light that could reach a surface. Areas in corners and sunken areas will receive shadowing. The numeric value increases the quality and range of effect of the occlusion. Enabling this option will slow performance somewhat. High Quality Light Shading and Material Shaders are required for occlusion to work.

Enables light shadowing from those lights which have their Shadow Type parameter set to a shadowing method. This option decreases performance and increases graphics memory use but greatly improves the quality of the viewport display.

These values correct for shadow mapping artifacts, which look like moire patterns or 'shadow acne' on surfaces. In general, to fix self-shadowing artifacts on surfaces that are oriented more edge-on to the light, change the first value. Change the second value for artifacts appearing on surfaces perpendicular to the direction to the light.

Increasing the shadow quality will improve the shadow’s visualization, especially for area and environment lights, with a corresponding performance decrease.

Controls the resolution of the shadow maps, based on the individual light object’s settings, or using a global setting for all lights. Increasing the shadow map size will reduce the jaggedness of shadow edges and improve fine shadow detail. Larger maps may affect performance and will use more graphics memory.

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 discs. Displaying particles as discs is useful for simulating clouds, since it uses correct transparency.

Draw particles that quality as sprites as sprites (choose a Sprite POP to specify the sprite). A particle must have one of the spriteshop, spriterot or spritescale attributes present to be considered a sprite.

The size, in pixels, of particle points.

The size, in Houdini units, of the discs.

Turning this on will orient discs to normals. If there are no normals, it will orient to velocity.

The maximum display size of a sprite texture.