I was doing the vex lava tutorial and I could not get the reflective vop to give me what they showed.

No matter what I always got a black surface. :?:

Wren
I was doing the vex lava tutorial and I could not get the reflective vop to give me what they showed.
No matter what I always got a black surface. :?:

Hi Warren,

I don't know the lava tutorial, but AFAIK the reflective vop works as advertised, so… are you giving it anything to reflect? – i.e: are there any other objects in the scene that are *not* purely reflective but, say, “plastic”? is there any light hitting those other non-reflective objects? (light hitting purely reflective objects doesn't count).
I know it's an obvious question, but it's those little things that get me all the time

Those questions were floating in my head. :wink:

I dont know what to say.

other then

In part 2 of the vex lava video tutorial for 5.5 when the reflective vop was applied it made the surface all white.


http://www.vislab.usyd.edu.au/sidefx/houdini_video/by_topic/rendering/index.html [vislab.usyd.edu.au]

(near the bottom of the page)

Being like Mario and avoiding having to dig thru an entire tutorial , is it possible that the default shaderball behaviour of Reflect in VOPs has changed from white to black? I could see how the former might have been a default but they changed it.

More importantly - is it just the shaderball that's having the problem, or is the final result busted too? The point is, in 6.1 when you connect a Reflective VOP to an output - the shaderball *should* be black unless you've specified an env map. The shaderball exists in a unique space and other reflect-able objects don't exist there - nor will it self-reflect there.

Cheers,

J.C.

The SHOPs viewer can put up virtual walls around your shaderball, giving the raytracing in the Reflective VOP something to strike instead of shooting out into infinity. At the bottom on the shaderball there is a pulldown menu (it may be stowed) and select one of the preset patterned walls.

Sorry for taking so long to reply……been busy with work.

You were absolutely right!

The defaults were different and soon as I changed backgrounds it went from black to white.


Same with adding and environment map!

Thnx guys!