It seems like Houdini is rendering one of my objects as entirely black in the viewport. The ‘issue’ resolves itself if I simply set the display flag on the 2nd to last sop (polyknit1 in my image) within that object, then switch it back to the last sop (what it was originally, on polyknit2). My viewport mode is ‘Flat wire shaded’.

Is this a bug, or a feature? This seems to happen every time I open this scene.

Images and scene attached.

Most likely flipped normals. turn the normals display on and off, that should fix it. Houdini really has a problem with displaying normals correctly unless you explicitly create them.

Just in case that anyone else having a similar issue - I had everything with a texture displayed black (loaded file from pluralsight.com tutorials). I have watched 30 minutes of tutorials on how to flip normals to solve this. Well, I have learnt how to do that (will come handy later I am sure) but my object apparently had all normals in check but still appeard black. I have solved my issue by turning all lights off (small bulb icon at the right edge of the scene viewport pan). Hope that helps

That light bulb button (light switch?) is a very helpful hint. Thanks!

Turning off the scene lights to workaround the issue is not a solution.

There is some underlying problem when rendering scene lights (not the headlight), on objects.

It is not always there and some scenes don't exhibit this. I'm hoping to have this issue appear on a simple scene so I can send it in for debugging.

I find it often happens after Merge, some of inputs of Merge have N (normal) attributes, and others do not.
If this is your situation, trying to delete the N attributes before Merge may solve this problem.

Dear all, it seems to be that the CD attribute is layered(tinted) ontop of the textures.
By default its black when I import for ex fbx files, just delete the CD attribute or add a color node that is white it and it should work.

All the best /Jens