So whilst following along with a tutorial I've noticed that when an object is flat white it displays as grey in the viewport. Further head scratching and i switch to the technical desktop and hey presto - white object. So the build desktop is doing something specific to the look of the geometry (something intentional and clever no doubt), but where is it being controlled from?

Actually, maybe it's not that simple, I've repeated the exercise and now none of the other desktops will display the geo as white. I'm completely confused! I'm controlling the colour of the object with an attribute vop which is working… make it red - the object goes red, make it white and the object goes grey. Attribute speadsheet says it's peak white.

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cheers,


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Hello,
It's because of the default diffuse color in the Display Options>effect
it's a light grey and when you put Cd , it's multiply with this grey.
It's because the default diffuse must be lighter than specular i thing so you can see the shading.
if you want to see the color as they are in the viewport , changing the default diffuse is not a good option i think but you can add a material and you will see that you get some light grey for the default base color also , keep use point color option(so it's taking Cd into acoumpt)but change base color to white , and now you will see every color as they are…

thanks you Benjamin, bit of a learning curve with Houdini! So you recommend piping the cd attribute (or which ever attribute you want to access) into a constant shader to visualise it… Would i need to put CDR CDG CDB in the right slots in the shader for this to work?

Hey , Andi
I'm learning like you :-)
it's not really a constant shader (just the default principle shader)
but with the default value(the grey one) turned to white so it's not changing the Cd value you've put

but i think that to visualize an attribute you better use the visualizer :

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/visualizers/color [sidefx.com]

but maybe someone with better knowledge than me will give you a better answer :-)

P.S. : but , in fact, i think it's a bit odd that in “no lighting” option in the viewport you still get the default diffuse messing with the Cd color of object , i'm wondering if it was previously the case in H15 …