Shading Materials

This is a new feature in Houdini 9. To learn about more new features, see what’s new in Houdini 9.

Overview

Materials let you encapsulate one or more shaders (such as a surface color shader, a displacement shader, and a properties shader) into a higher-level node. You can set some parameters on the contained shaders to fixed values and promote other parameters up to the material for users to control.

Material Palette

The material palette has ready-to-use materials available in the gallery for you to drag and drop onto geometry objects. You can also create your own materials in the SHOP network and add them to your gallery.

See the material palette documentation.

Creating your own material and adding it to the gallery file

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

  2. Create one or more SHOPs inside it, and connect it to the suboutput node.

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

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

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

Removing materials from the scene

Select the material you want to remove and press Del . You can also click the material you want to remove and select Delete.