Okay I'm new to houdini and I'm a bit confused about a certain purposes of the Off the Shelf tools.

So in those tools you can quickly create for example a cloud, you basically click on it and it applies properties to a polygon object.

Well, what are these off the shelf tools? Are they considered tools like the extrude tool and basically an essential piece of the software? Because they seem to me like, something like a special photo filter which is applied to an image. It's slapped on there and you get a certain kind of effect like let's say increases contrast and black and white and you're done. Or you could those kind of adjustments manually so you have done them sort of properly and individual to each image. Is that more accurate?

The reason for asking is when I tried to go deeper in some of those nodes there are a couple of other node trees I couldn't access which led me to believe that the shelf tools are kind way to simple put a “filter” (so to speak) on there which gives you immediate results, but if you want it to be perfectly fitted you need to build those trees all yourself?

Or is it just a tool like any other and off the shelf simply means those are prepared tools and if you want to individualise those effects then you need to program a new tool?

So proper tool or just a preset?

Seems like kind of a dumb question but it just kept bugging me

Not a dumb question! I can't speak for all shelf tools, but most of them are a way to get -something- relatively quickly. It's generally not going to be close to what you want, but it's a way to put down something that will give you some result.

I use them as a quick way to get started, rather than having to start from nothing, especially wrt to simulations.

Some tools I use pretty much exclusively through the shelf (insert edge loops, editing capture weights).

Hope that helps!

Just to add on goldleafs very well explaination.

I see them as two kinds of things:
Reference and timesavers

If you are new to a certain kind of effect, for example doing Grains for the first time, its great just to take look at the network they built and learn from it.

Also if you just need some smoke, you can either lay down all the nodes yourself or rely on those to just lay them out for you and tweak from there.

So preset, not tool.

That clears things up! Thank you guys! I figured it was just a node network preset to sort of give you an idea. I just wasn't sure if it was considered a tool a task or just a preset.
Just didn't know if you could build the node network without the need of programming.
Thanks!