(Coming back to Houdini after MANY years doing character stuff in Maya)
I have not tried this since PRISMS but I used to be able to polar map textures onto sphere primitives. I don't seem to be able to do this any longer.

Sphere SOP - Primitive Type = Primitive - into
UVTexture SOP - polar, Y axis - into
UVQuickShade

result = no texture

Sphere SOP: change Primitive Type to every other choice & the texture shows

UVTexture SOP info shows VERTEX UVs are there but since the info also shows only 1 vertex, I know this is the issue.

I have a cloud map of Saturn from JPL. I want the speed of rendering a sphere primitive. If I remember correctly, the perfect NURBS sphere is a reasonable alternative but is more weighty for render times.

So, I'm just wondering if it's still possible. I looked at the primitive SOP but didn't see anything that looked helpful at first glance.

tx,
Russ

Wow PRISMS! Much has changed.

Get rid of your uv's on the primitives (primitive spheres that is and I mean get rid of your vertex or point uv attributes) and the Material surface shader will use the inerent s and t coordiantes of your primitive sphere. There's only a single point describing the primitive and a single uv coordinate will be built breaking the rendering pipeline for primitives.

I don't believe we were ever able to preview textures on primitives in the viewport… I will have to go to Kim's office and try it out in PRISMS.

Btw UV Quickshade will also add uv textures so will break rendering textures as well.

rlsmith
(Coming back to Houdini after MANY years doing character stuff in Maya)
I have not tried this since PRISMS but I used to be able to polar map textures onto sphere primitives. I don't seem to be able to do this any longer.

Sphere SOP - Primitive Type = Primitive - into
UVTexture SOP - polar, Y axis - into
UVQuickShade

result = no texture

Sphere SOP: change Primitive Type to every other choice & the texture shows

UVTexture SOP info shows VERTEX UVs are there but since the info also shows only 1 vertex, I know this is the issue.

I have a cloud map of Saturn from JPL. I want the speed of rendering a sphere primitive. If I remember correctly, the perfect NURBS sphere is a reasonable alternative but is more weighty for render times.

So, I'm just wondering if it's still possible. I looked at the primitive SOP but didn't see anything that looked helpful at first glance.

tx,
Russ

PRISMS only supported polygons.

The uv attribute in the texture SOP is applied to points or vertices. For a sphere primitive, there's only one point, so there would only be one texture coordinate. Hope that makes sense.

For rendering, the sphere primitive has implicit parametric coordinates which you can pick up in your shader (s, t). If needed, you can manipulate the s/t coordinates in your shader.

Welcome back Russ.

It's Russ!

Hi Russ.

Hi Mark (Elendt?):
You might remember in 1993 you had Mantra support for rendering spheres and blobbies. I used that functionality for a solar system fly through I did at Lost In Space.

The poly sphere was displayed in the viewer but the primitive was rendered for perfect profile curvature. I think it was some sort of switch in the render properties. The polar coordinates that were applied to the polygon sphere transferred to the primitive without any effort.

Congrats on over 200 years at Sidefx





Hi back to you Jeff! (Wagner? Marshall?) It's good to be home. I went to my first Vancouver SESI user group meeting last night at DD. There were many technical issues but very informative none the less.

Wagner…

In PRISMS you probably put the Render toggle on the Second input SOP to the Copy SOP and the display flag on the Copy SOP in the stack.

Mantra still has the ability to render primitive spheres on points. Use an Add SOP to convert any geometry to a particle system then append a Primitive SOP and use the Particle Folder to render as spheres, disks, tubes, capped tubes, etc. Just like the old PRISMS days.