Since the start of the Houdini 9 series, its been apparent the efforts Side Effects have gone to, to make Houdini more accessible to artists and for that reason I thought I would write something about my experience over the last month. I've come over from Lightwave and so my entry into the world of Houdini has been an interesting one, to say the least!

Lightwave introduced me to nodes and their potential and I have found working with the nodes in Houdini, comfortable if a bit different. SOPS nodes are fantastic and I'm loving what I've seen of CHOPS so far. The learning curve has been a little steep in some places, but now I'm getting the hang of using channel referencing and expressions, I'm starting to really enjoy myself

DOPS and POPS have been good fun also. So powerful, yet fairly accessible even for a Houdini noob - got to love the rigidbody glue object! The fluid and gas solver stuff is pretty daunting though. While undoubtedly powerful, the number of building blocks you need to make an effect come to life creates a steep learning curve IMO.

SHOPS - this is the hardest and most frustrating bit for me. I'm still hopelessly confused by the shaders. I wanted to wire a vex metal shader and a vex gsplatter together in some way, but couldn't find any information on this. Its seems to take ages to create a surface effect which takes five minutes in Lightwaves node editor.

That's as far as I've seen so far, not explored COPS or ROPS too much yet. So overall, Houdini HD has been the best $100 I spent this year and I'm sure it will continue to bring me hours of fun! But if there is one thing I would change, its the way textures and shaders are accessed. I would prefer to have a higher level access, so I can just plug things in like I can in Lightwave. Of course VEX shader builders should be there for the power user, but IMHO if Side Effects wants to continue attracting new users, then making the shading and rendering side of things easier and faster is perhaps the next area to focus on.

You could use composite node? I'm just guessing here, other than some basic playing around I have no idea what I'm doing in VEX.

It seems like in the combine section is all the stuff you want.

I'm pretty much at the same point with VEX. No real clue what I'm doing and stumbling about with occasional success :roll:

I just think it should easier to work at a higher level. Combing existing shaders and layering maps and procedurals without stepping into VEX networks. It feels like I got to go deep to get effect taken for granted in other apps - Fresnel, occlusion etc…

Its a shame there isn't that much learning material about for this side of Houdini.

I take it the materials in the gallery are not doing it for you?

You don't have to go to the vex editor. You can put down a shop network node, dive into the Shop editor and create Materials there. That's quite straightforward.
To make the shop nodes a Material, use the Shift-C command. Then RMB on the new material node and near the top you'll see “Promote Material Parameters” and you'll get a parameter interface with the controls you need.

Thanks. I got that working, but it would be nice to be able to grab a g_marble and a g_granite and overlay or mix them together in some way. I can't see a way to that though.