I'm not seeing a easy pathway for 3rd party rendering of Terrain.

Converting the Terrain Mesh to Polygons gives you something renderable (a mesh), but from what I can see, there's several issues:

• Drop a Mountain Terrain, notice the Terrain UV's are planar, Convert the Terrain to Polygons, notice the Point Colors are mapped planar, so the height based color ramp is lost.
  
• Looks like there's a COP Ramp that's used to Map colors in OpenCL - which gives a great viewport representation. How can I bake what colors I see in the Viewport down?
  
• I suspect if the Terrain convert to Polygons handled the Terrain Material colors more elegantly, I wouldnt need to bake the Terrain Material down, the Point Colors would be enough, as there is enough Mesh detail already from the conversion.
  

Hi Daryl,

Maybe you could try using a world space position probe to drive mapping of other shader nodes. Here's an example done in Arnold but the principle should be the same because world space position is a general 3D concept not unique to Houdini. I'm sure you can do this in Redshift pretty easily.

Example (about half way through video):

https://vimeo.com/170545984 [vimeo.com]


Here it is working in H15.5. Arnold isn't available yet for H16 so this terrain model was created in H16 and brought into H15.5 as an OBJ. At this point you can control placements of shading however you want based on the position map. I'm sure there's a very similar workflow in Redshift. Hope this helps.

Thanks Tobias,

I was able to render something presentable with Redshift, by using the Height scalar to drive a Ramp. The thing is, I had to recreate the COP Ramp, to get close to the existing Viewport look at render time.

I'm looking for a workflow that allows LookDev in the Houdini Viewport, versus relying on render time iterations.

So, talking it out loud here…really, the stumbling block is the mapping of the Volume colors to the resultant mesh.

Which I suppose I could wire something up myself.

I don't use Redshift so forgive any ignorance on my part. I'm guessing if it has an ipr mode that works in Houdini like Arnold, Mantra, or Renderman does then you wouldn't have any look dev issues by using the live ipr render view. I don't believe Houdini actually supports display of shader elements in the native scene view window for shaders that are not the built in Mantra or Renderman offerings. Long story short, whatever you can build in your render engine should update easy enough in the Houdini Render Viewer via that renderer's ipr engine. This should be true for any method of color assignment.

Yes, Redshift does have IPR support, and is also close to delivering a custom Framebuffer as well. That's how I achieved what I have so far, using the IPR to do LookDev on the colors of the converted Terrain mesh to match the Viewport.

But, I'm speaking more from a Pipeline perspective: If I know I can get out what I'm seeing in the Viewport, then I can wrap that in an HDA, and spit out hundreds of asset variations via Houdini Engine on another computer.

You can link ramp parameters using the pyro python module.

jsmack
You can link ramp parameters using the pyro python module.

Can you elaborate a lil more on this?….I've never used Pyro

The module is called pyro2. Open the source to see how it works.

I'm still not really sure of what you're trying to tell me/what I'm supposed to understand by your statement?

Do you have an example hiplc file you can share?

…or a screenshot?

edit: Here is what I get by default: {Terrain is Left, Polygon from Convert is Right}