Lighting Viewport Shadows

Once you have lights in your scene, you can set up your display options to display shadows in the viewport. This makes it easier to determine what shadows will look like at render time.

To display shadows in the viewport

Set up lights in your scene.
Turn on shadows on the Shadow tab of the light node.
On the Misc tab of the 3D viewer Display Options window, turn on the Shadows checkbox.

You can also turn on the Projected Textures checkbox which will clean up the look of your shadows.

Note

Displaying shadows in the viewport may slow down Houdini, since it needs to generate a shadow map for each light casting shadows.