Hi all,

right off the bat - i did take a lot of time searching into this on forums and online. I figured it might as well be best to just ask here.

What is the current state of doing your own game shaders and materials in Houdini (think Unreal Material Editor, Shader Forge, Shader FX and so on)

With the game tools constantly improving i am wondering if this is something that could be done in Houdini!

The first thing that came to my mind where some UV animated/distorted Shaders that drive VFX. Will post example at the bottom.

I know 90% of the nodes (math and such) are already there but i think there is nothing like a panner or rotate node if i am not mistaken.

I have pretty much found nothing in regards to that online - but i figure it would be a great combo with Houdinis existing toolset!

Would some of the devs be so kind and maybe give a little overview, maybe even on what is to come?

A broad overview of what i had in mind - especially in terms of material building:

https://youtu.be/wFakil7JGq0 [youtu.be]


I hope i got across what i mean

All the best!

Hey there.

For shaders in the viewport your best bet is writing a custom glsl shader. It's in our roadmap to build examples of how to do this.

For Mantra, like you said it's all there. We also have plans of building a few materials there in order to recreate impostors and some other common games techniques.

Are you looking for mantra or viewport?

Hi Luiz!
Thanks for your quick response - in my case it is definitely viewport
Hearing about examples for custom glsl shaders is great!

I saw a response from Jeff in another thread:

https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/41963/ [www.sidefx.com]

No GLSL node network in H15. Although you can author your own GLSL shaders and use them in the viewport.

We don't see VOPs authoring GLSL at this time. VEX is way too flexible to shove in to GLSL.

We are writing the GLSL to try to match what the shaders are doing in Mantra though.

Since i am not very technical this (and the rest of the thread) confused me a little and i thought VEX is the way to go instead of glsl.
But when it comes to realtime i always only heard about glsl/hlsl.

If you simplify it a lot, could you say that VEX is for offline/mantra and glsl is for viewport?
I guess it is a little more complicated than that, i am just trying to break it down a lot for myself to understand.

It would be really cool to use Houdini like the Unreal Material editor or shader forge in unity. Do UV distortion and transforms, noise etc. and have it all there in the viewport running “live”

Thanks for your help! Really like what you guys put out all the time hopefully making Houdini a powerhouse/standard for games!

All the best!