I am following Konstantin Magnus and he uses specular but my results are not at all like his. his is very glass like while mine is flat with almost no reflection. I have attached a screenshot of his tutorial where he adds PBR specular. when I type PBR Specular nothing show up, but I do get specular. I know it must be something simple I am not doing.

It's hidden.

enter in the Textport:
opunhide Vop pbrspecular
opunhide Vop pbrspecular::2.0
opunhide Vop pbrspecular::3.0

Since H15(?) its probably more like this:

thank you both for replying and assistance and creating a model for it. why do they have them hidden, because they have been superseded?

The approach to composing shaders in general has changed to support more physically correct results. That has caused these methods older methods to be deprecated. That and a bunch of other features added in H16.

To support modern material construction methods (structs, methods, pre-compiled shader materials with overrides) the way you construct shaders has been refactored to use the layer struct type.

Konstantin's shader is the way to do it.

Wire in order:

Diffuse -> Reflect -> other BSDFs with base struct input -> Layer Unpack VOP -> Collect VOP.

Notice how the shader is layered in a logical manner where you first put down the PBR Diffuse layer output in to the PBR Reflect layer base input. Internally this uses composite_bsdf() to properly composite the two Layer structs together based on the BSDF energy from the reflection lobe (from the BSDF evaluation of the current ray) and return proper light conserving output.

Contrast this with the naive approach where you simply add the two BSDF's together (top network in the image). This would be kind of equivalent to the older method from the old material tutorial.
The naive approach has a completely different result where you get indirect bounce light contribution:



Also notice the number of VOPs you need to compose the older shader from the old scene vs. the newer shader in H16. Lots of convenience options have been added to do the right thing and streamline the creation of shaders.

An interesting thought (because I haven't tested this) but I am assuming the new options on the Mantra ROP to control the quality levels of Diffuse, Reflect, Refract and SSS Quality settings would tie in to correctly constructed shaders.

WOW thank you old_school, I really do appreciate the explanation and example. I have been playing with Houdini about 4 months coming from Cinema4D. I have lots and lots to learn, that is why I like short focused tutorials like the one Konstantin used then take that and expand on it to learn more about how Houdini handles scenes. Man y'all are aces in helping newbies.

Many thanks again to all.