Hi all

I am having trouble with the shader sop - - i keep receiving a warning saying “this sop has been depreciated in favor of the material sop”.

What is the difference between the Shader Sop and the Material Sop?

Thanks

The Shader SOP works with individual SHOP types like Surface SHOPs and Displacement SHOPs.
The warning can be safely ignored if you know what to do to support the Shader SOP (see below). Or simply switch over to the Material SOP and point it at a Material SHOP folder (SHOP folder containing Surface SHOPs and Displacement SHOPs).

The Material SOP works with Materials. In Houdini 9, Materials appeared as a method to support the wrapping up (encapsulation) of Surface SHOPs, Displacement SHOPs, Mantra Proceudral SHOPs (delayed load from disk, etc…) and Properties SHOPs (for defining Mantra property options) in to a single folder. It also works well with SOHO (Scripted Output of Houdini Operators) when it generates the scene description .ifd/.rib/.mi/etc… files.

You can still use the Shader SOP with materials. I don't (at this time) but you can. You just have to point it at the Surface and Displacement (if available) SHOPs inside a material. If there are any procedural SHOPs inside the Material, you have to reference them on the Object's Procedural parameter. If there are Properties inside the material, you have to manually add these properties to the object.

Thanks Jeff

That's great, cheers for clearing that up.