Together with an optional complimentary 3d Viewport Background color-theme, that I have fine-tuned over the years, it should serve well as a neutral, distraction-free base to build upon.
Thought I would share them here in case anyone finds them useful. See the accompanying images and videos for a preview.
orange.theme.json [www.sidefx.com]
orange.theme.json [github.com]
3DSceneColors.dg [www.sidefx.com]
3DSceneColors.dg [github.com]
Place the
orange.theme.jsonfile in your "$HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR"/Config/Themesfolder. Place the
3DSceneColors.dgfile in your "$HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIR"/Configfolder. You may find the location of your
$HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIRby running the command: echo $HOUDINI_USER_PREF_DIRin a Hscript Textport window. Create the subfolders mentioned if they don't exist. You will need to restart Houdini for the changes to show up. ————————————————————————
UI Color theme
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The theme that Houdini 22 defaults to, suffers from a few problems. One of them being that the icons are quite illegible. Not only do they lack inherent contrast, they also blend into their similarly-colored backgrounds. There's a thread [www.sidefx.com] discussing this. I have increased the perceived contrast and used a complimentary color for the background, making them much more legible at a glance.
I chose Orange as the main icon tint, not only because it is close to the Houdini branding color (used prominently in the UI of older versions), but also because orange, red and yellow are used in many icons and interactive elements which cannot be customized (yet). Using Orange seemed to harmonize and integrate the overall look the most. It is fortunate that the greyish-blue that the UI has been favoring in the recent past (e. g. the node-info panel) is a close complement to the Orange and works well as the background color.
I have used a darker color for the input-fields because I found it to be much more legible and practical for long-term usage, and also because it makes the new UI feel much more familiar to those using Houdini for a long time.
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3d Viewport Background
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The 3d viewport color theme is designed to reduce the need to switch between themes as much as possible. To make most objects discernible most of the time. Being as dark as possible while letting absolute Blacks show through, which can help with reading the silhouettes of stray objects, points or particles.
The translucent black grid lines offer much better contrast against the default shading of objects compared to the light-greys that the other themes use, most of the time. They are less distracting against a dark background and lend the ruler-numerals more prominence, helping with awareness of the scale of the scene at a glance.
It builds on the 'Dark Grey' theme that already ships with Houdini and overrides only a few of the colors of the original. The provided file only contains the changes, the bulk of the values get imported from the base file at startup.
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Future Changes
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This aspect of Houdini is very new, possibly still in development and may be subject to changes in upcoming versions. The choice of colors, saturation and lightness have an indirect influence in a lot of other places that cannot be directly controlled, yet, but may be in later versions, e.g. the network wires, tool-tips, text-cursors, field-outlines etc.
I have taken care to test the legibility in all such areas, given the current constraints, as much as I could. But there may be problems that I have missed. Which is why I am also including links to the files in a Github repository where I'll be housing and updating them with any further improvements and fixes. I will also try to keep this thread updated, if possible.
If you use them and find anything that is problematic, it will be great if you could let me know.