Hi,

Is it possible to preview a surface and displacement shader at the same time on SHOP level? In my Magic of Houdini book, it says that if I have a surface shader selected, I can use the dropdown menus in the top stowbar of the Viewer Pane to add a displacement shader. When I have a shader selected in the viewer though, none of the other shaders seem to be available in the dropdown menus, even if I have both shaders selected in the Network pane. All that is availble in the displacement dropdown is “None”.

Is there some setting that I need to turn on?

Thanks,

Henry

If I download the hip file from the book's website, the dropdown options are there, so it must be a setting somewhere.

Anyone know what I did wrong?

Much appreciated,

Henry

Hi Henry,

actually it's a bit confusing.
here's the trick that got it to work for me.

1) Forget about all OBJECTS/OBJ and GEOMETRY/SOPS sops for a sec,
(primarily where you have been working in this book)
and in a window change from OBJECTS/OBJ and jump into SHOPS (select from the top pull down menu). Put down your Polka Dots and Choppy Water shaders here inside of SHOPS.

2) Now change the dropdown menu back to GEOMETRY/Sops, jump into your object and place a “Shop Network”. Jump inside it and you should have access from the “shops drop down menues” at the top (in the stow bar) of the viewport window. The left one is for “Polka DOts” and the middle one is for “choppy water”

This threw me for a bit. I don't think it's a bug though, but it might be.

Jim

Hey Henry,

on further inspection I think this a bug.
Don't worry though.

Just build your shaders in inside of SHOPS (instead of of obj/model/shopnet1)
and then when it's time to reference them for the actual geometry (by placeing a “shader sop”) just reference the shaders from SHOPS instead of the obj/model/shopnet1 location

So that should get you through the lessons on shops.

This will later be a problem with the creation of OTL's, but that doesn't happen until much later in the book.

Unless I'm missing something here,
this is a bug.
Anyone else have any ideas?

I'm using houdini master version 8.0.474

Jim

I think there is a bug (reported when I was writing the book ) that the shader previews don't work unless the shaders are in /shop but if they are in SHOPnets elsewhere (like /obj/Thing/shopnet) then they don't work.

Cheers,

Peter B

Hi………

Another thing that I found was, when you r in shop, you can not see both the surface and displacement shaders at a time in viewer, when you have seleced any one of them. But you can add any other kind of noder like Switch node to shop, select it, and you will get both the surface and displacement menus enabled, in viewer. You don't have to connect it to anything, just add and select.
This for those who just want to work thru shop.
Shopnet problem is still puzzling me.

——–iamjaideep80