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What’s new in Houdini 9: Lighting

Houdini 9 has new preset lights and lighting nodes, as well as new materials.

Lighting improvements

Houdini 9 has made creating and placing lights much more interactive. There are six preset lights on the Lights and Cameras shelf that save you from having to customize a single light node. Houdini 9 also provides you with a new light node called Light Template which has no preset values, and is customizable with render properties.

Placing lights and cameras is now easier than ever. You can simply click the preset lights on the Lights and Cameras shelf and you are ready to use them! You can even look through them for a better idea of what will be illuminated. See the Lights and Cameras shelf help for more details.

The Point Light, Spot Light, Area Light, Distant Light, and Environment Light all put down a Light node with preset parameters, which you can change. You can alter the color, intensity, interference etc. or even change the Light Type to a different preset type using the drop-down menu. However, the Ambient Light puts down an Ambient Light node since its unique from the other five.

VOP and SHOP Hierarchy

VOPs now live inside SHOPs, and a material is a collection of one or more SHOPs. For example, a material can contain a surface shader and a displacement shader.

Material Palette

Houdini 9 will have new ready-to-use materials available in the gallery for you to drag and drop onto geometry objects.

Quick Start

To...Do this

Put a gallery material on a geometry object

On the Material Palette, drag the material from the gallery file onto the geometry object.

Put a gallery material on a selected region of a geometry object

  1. On the Material Palette, drag the material from the gallery file into the scene.

  2. Click the Update all material icons button.

  3. Select the material from the Material Palette and click the Assign button.

  4. Select the primitives you want to apply the material to and press Enter to confirm your selection.

Create your own material

  1. In the SHOP network, create a material node.

  2. Create one or more SHOPs inside it.

    If you create more than one SHOP, select them both, click RMB and select Collapse to merge the SHOPs into a new material.

Add your material to the gallery file

  1. In the SHOP network, click RMB the new material node and select Save to Gallery.

  2. Load the gallery file into the material palette, and put it on the geometry as described above.

For more information, see the Materials help.