set a hotkey to reset the viewport and press, press, press...
This has always been the most important thing for the Houdini viewport

ajz3d
Save as Default" button in Display Options will preserve modified settings.

The nuance is that it does not save, although it should.
It is enough to close and open Houdini and make sure that the checkbox is removed again.
What is funny is that in Vulkan, despite the disabled setting in the parameters, it is enabled by default in the viewport buttons, but in OpenGL it is always disabled. This is a banal bug, I think, which spoils the already not very good viewport.

BabaJ
For people like myself - the defaults are perfectly fine as is.

For you - maybe. But think about why people are into 3D? Not 2D? People like the feeling of volume, three-dimensionality. And a viewport with bad shading quickly kills enthusiasm and motivation, destroys the dopamine response of the brain. 99.5% of the time we look at a gray viewport and 0.5% at a good render. No render improvements will compensate for the harm from a bad viewport. I watched tutorials of fairly well-known artists who complained that they lose motivation if they look at the Houdini viewport screen for a long time and therefore constantly switched to redshift to get inspired by the volumetric picture of the intermediate render. And I thought, God, I'm not the only one who falls into apathy from this gray screen. And how many noobs lose enthusiasm? And judging by the gray flat tutorials on YouTube, few people know that this viewport can be improved.

tamte
I don't think Hscript has options to specify groups for those functions

yes, this feature is missing, but what would stop developers from adding it?
I don't like the idea of ​​replacing a short string like bbox(0, D_XMIN, chs("group")) with a long string hou.pwd().inputGeometry(0).pointBoundingBox("my group").sizevec(), which 1) needs to be memorized 2) learned in the Python library for Houdini 3) entered into a tiny 5-character window. This is strictly the opposite of convenience and speed.
In an era when AI will soon throw us out on the street, we want the shortest and fastest tools. This is my message to developers.
Or, for example, you could make a module of 3 lines with 3 small buttons and the user could set the pivot to any corner of the geometry or group in three clicks.
X - /MIN/ /CEN/ /MAX/
Y - /MIN/ /CEN/ /MAX/
Z - /MIN/ /CEN/ /MAX/

And include this module in the interface in all nodes where there is a pivot/origin.
three clicks vs hou.pwd().inputGeometry(0).pointBoundingBox("my group").sizevec()
hou.pwd().inputGeometry(0).pointBoundingBox("my group").sizevec()
hou.pwd().inputGeometry(0).pointBoundingBox("my group").sizevec()

Yes, this is fantastic

If you use a group in any node, then the transformation is applied only to this group, which is logical. But if you use the bbox and centroid functions in the parameters, they will be calculated for the entire geometry. This can be considered logical or illogical. But I would definitely like to get the result of these functions for the selected group for the correct placement of the pivot point or alignment. Now you have to write duplicate tools in Vex, although all that is needed is to expand the functions so that they can accept a group of points as an optional argument and give a result for them. And the old tools would not be affected and in the new ones you could easily work with the bounds of the selected group. Of course, you can delete the geometry, calculate the desired point, save it in an attribute, access it from another node, or make hda. This works, but is not viable due to the inconvenience.

By the way, bbox could also return the center, why multiply unnecessary functions like centroid?

Don't whine, it's ridiculous money for so many lulz every day. I gave it to the developers with pleasure and will give it again. And there are still more goodies in Houdini than bugs.

hotkey for subdiv ?

Probably in the transition zone you should apply the interpolation function lerp multiplied by the factor from the ramp. lerp interpolates linearly, and you set the smoothness/curvature of the transition in the ramp.

How to improve viewport visibility.

By default, meshes in the viewport are illuminated and look like it's the 90s. This is because occlusion is disabled by default. In the video, I show this occlusion checkbox on the second "Headlight only" button. And immediately the model becomes much more readable. The nuance is that this checkbox is not saved in any way. Not in the file, nor in the viewport settings, nor in the desktop settings. No one bothers to turn it on for the 1000th time, and therefore, whenever Houdini is opened, you will always have a poorly visible viewport and you must not forget to go and turn this checkbox on. And remember that the "ambient occlusion" checkboxes under other buttons have no effect without turning on the checkbox under the second button. This is so Houdini-like, but it will confuse other users. It is also useful to reduce the specular roughness to 0.1 and greatly increase the ambient occlusion in the settings by pressing the D key in the "light" section.
The second option is to enable the light environment in obj and put hdri there directly from the folder with houdini, I take this $HFS/houdini/pic/hdri/HDRIHaven_lenong_1_2k.rat.
And this already looks pretty decent. And again, you will have to do this in each file.
And here is a question for the staff - after all, all this could have been enabled by default, the built-in hdri with a button could have been for quick switching on and houdini would not look so miserable. So why is this not so? You already have everything, but it seems like you specially made it so that when you launch houdini looks like an alien from the 90s and the user cannot fix such a default, and configuring it every time is labor-intensive. This is very strange to me.

Guys, how can I assign a hotkey to select geometry in the Group field? I circled the arrow in the screenshot.
I tried selecting Restart selection and Quick selection in the hotkey editor, but it had no effect. What is the correct name of this function?
And by the way, does anyone know what Restart selection and Quick selection are for in the hotkey editor actions?

One of the most incomprehensible things to me is the very, very bad shading in the normal modeling mode with the default material. This is the worst shading of all the programs on the market, IMHO. Blender, Cinema, Maya, Rhino, Plasticity, Moi3D and others - the model is clearly visible everywhere and the sides are perfectly shaded. In Houdini, everything merges into a barely distinguishable spot. And this is very strange! After all, on the one hand, normal viewports in other programs, including free ones, say that this is an easy task, and on the other hand, SideFX has vast experience in developing two very high-quality renders, Mantra and Karma. But at the intersection, we have the worst viewport in the industry. How is this possible? It doesn't add up in my head. I had high hopes for Vulcan - but there is no difference.

Sorry, friend, materialix karma nodes are a mystery to me compared to other renderers and are waiting to be studied. So I'm not an expert in them, but it's worth studying the help, I'm going to study it myself.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/solaris/kug/textures.html [www.sidefx.com]

Attribute names can be shown in full, but group names cannot. Classic non-unification of the Houdini interface.
But overall it's not bad.

It seems to me that the texture does not use uv coordinates, but uses world (or object) space coordinates. The cover moves through space, the pixel coordinates change, the texture moves. Check what coordinates are included in your texture, I assume it is definitely not uv

Yeah, thanks, got it. It's a shame that the help for this node doesn't emphasize this with such a deviation from typical behavior, I had to jump around a lot of pages to find an explanation for these spaces.

Let's take noise from 0 to 1 and include it in the monotorgb and ramp nodes, and set the ramp color to infrared. We see that in monotorgb the colors have become from blue to red, as it should be. And in the ramp node - from green to red, as if ramp is waiting for an input from -1 to +1, which is not typical at all.
Is this a bug or do I not understand the logic of the node?

Does anyone know how to make a camera rig in Solaris? How to run a camera on a curve?

in build 307 everything is fine

and I get an error...

UV works correctly, you probably made a mistake somewhere. Perhaps your profile is divided into parts?

For some reason, my hip hiplc and hipnc files are not associated with Houdini. Of course, I can manually set the default houdini.exe for hip, but as you understand, each build is placed in its own folder and then you need to change the binding every day. How to force Houdini so that the new build registers itself as the default application for hip?