Hello, I am trying to get my render chops up with houdini, so I can use it instead of octane and blender.

I'm running into what seems to be a point normal attribute problem. The first image shows the weird converging reflection I get with the original .obj. The next image shows the same .obj with an attribute SOP appeneded, deleting the N attribute. It seems to solve the first problem, but now the geometry below is getting some weird light and dark areas. Any ideas how to get all of my geometry nice and smooth/flat?

I guess I could just delete the N attribute from the problem primitives, but it would be nice to know what is going on.

Ok, I found the cusp edges sop. Not sure exactly what it's doing, but it made all the geometry nice and clean looking!

What cusping does is it separates each face of the model and have the normals of each face face out, kinda like nurbs. So you will have vertices not sharing faces. But glad you found the solution. Just my two cents on how cusping works to inform you.

Hey thanks for the explanation! I thought it was working…. but it didn't actually solve my problem. I should have just kept it in this topic, but I posted another thread here http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&p=129168#129168 [sidefx.com]

I found out that it's better to use a vertex SOP and cusp normals, as it does not create duplicate edges. http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=21951&highlight=vertex+cusp+edge [sidefx.com]

If don't want to change topology, using the cusp normals option on the Vertex SOP should work as well.