I'm trying to visualize content with normal maps in the Houdini viewport but it seems like I can't get anything to work. http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/basics/viewporteffects [sidefx.com] suggest that it should be possible

Things I've tried/done:
Enabled high quality lighting in the Display Options->effects
I've tried using FBX materials. Texturing in them seem to be generally broken only showing the last assigned texture as diffuse map.
I've tried using mantra materials such as mantra surface, stone etc and assigned various normal map textures to their normal channel both in the surface tab and the OpenGL tab.

Has anyone had any success showing normal maps in the viewport?
If so, what type of shader and setup did you use.
I'm running Houdini 14.0.361 on Windows 64bit and an AMD Radeon 270.

hi,
i was also trying to display normals from textures in houdini but without any luck.

One workaround tho is to set the bump map in the openGL tab, of the material, to reference to the normal map instead of the bump map. Also set Bump scalein opengl up to 10. this way you can at least preview it in some way.

hope it might help you?

another method is to write your own openGL shader to do it:

go to file –> new operator type

in the next dialog, choose SHOP type, and in the Network type, choose GLSL

nice thing is that you have full control on the tangent basis to generate and to render it. Not so nice is that you have to do it

I looked in to writing a glsl shader as the workaround but the problem I found was that I didn't know how to feed in any external colors and textures into it.

I tried adding parameters to the parameter interface and hoped they would be matched the ones in the glH_Material structure.
Do you know how that works?

http://forums.odforce.net/topic/22053-vertex-uv-in-glsl/ [forums.odforce.net]

maybe this is a good starting point?

you can add paramter t_diffmap to add a texture.
from there you could build up the shader and add your normal texture too. I think it should work there.

Seems a bit frustrating if you dont have a basic finished GLSL shader. I hope someone can provide you with better infos.

Normal maps are not currently supported by the default viewport shaders in 14.0. This is fixed in the next version of Houdini.

The parameters were originally used by the H11 viewport for normal mapping, though it was somewhat incorrectly applied, so it was dropped from the new viewport until it could be implemented correctly.

Thanks for the clarification!