I try to create a shader via VEX Builder. In a tutorial from gnomon there is a sphere in the viewport which i can see the results if I'm play arround with the settings. There are using an older version of houdini.

How can I see it in the actual version of houdini?

hi!
change one of the pane tabs to Shader View

Select the Look and Development desktop and then set the scene view to shader view. Point it to the right shop type and you are set!

ahh, so easy< :-)

But I have another question concerning the mantra renderer. I'm very disappointed that there is so less material out there specifical into shader/material.

I have a Maya/Mental Ray background and that is also not easy to learn espacally when it comes to complex material nodes. But there is a lot of training material available.

Would be great if someone can point me in the right direction. I know that a lot of production people using mantra so, are there all cracks? :-)

About the a lack of specific materials: Have you used the Material Palette? There are quite a few materials there in addition to the available SHOPs. You'd kind of expect the materials in the Materials Palette to also show up in the SHOPS <TAB> menu but they don't.

yes I have, for example the glass material.

I have opend the VEX nodes and baaang I was shocked. I'm sure I would never recreat that material.

Well glass is one of the most challenging things to write a shader for…try an easier one like bricks or concrete.

The glass was also originally a lot less complex. But then some silly product specialist decided to add in the decal capabilities. :roll:

VOPs is for sure something to get your head around. I'd recommend starting with the basic material, or even the constant material and working your way up into the reflective material, before looking at glass. Once raytracing is factored in it becomes a lot more complex. The glass is also awkward in that it's visually transparent though the alpha and opacity channels are opaque.

lol, ok you mean yourself? :-)

I must say that I am very happy with Houdini and the way it works. As an Artist I never touched Houdini 8 and below because of its technical and mathematical approach. Now it's more artist friendly with the same power under the houd. As an maya/mental ray user I stucked also with the shader/material thing. But there is a lot of material out there (Digital Tutors/Gnomon) which is dedicated to material/shader/rendering.

It would be great to see something similar from SideFX or other partners which created proffesional training stuff.

As I heared from professionals mantra is used in production. So for me when it comes to render I'm feeling like a baby which can't speak.

So maybe up to you guys to change that with profound training material.

Thx

yup :-D

I agree, it's pretty mind boggling stuff at the moment to get started with VOPs but certainly we want to be able to get more people into it.

i would like to learn how to work with VOPs but there is not that much material to get me started in VOPs. Can you recommend any?
I also have problems understanding houdini help sometimes. E.g. when I need to find out what a node generates or what kind of input it accepts, I can't find anything like that. Most of the time help describes parameters inside of the node. Another example is when I was following a tutorial, the tutor referenced npoints() function. It's a very useful function but I had no idea it existed or what domain/scope it belongs to. Is there more help resources out there?