Hello all.

I'm completely new to Houdini, just started learning for about a week. I'm coming from a Maya background.

In Houdini, when you create a box (from the shelf tool), why does it appear to be “rounded”, as if the sides are not perfectly flat. And this is not only a viewport issue, when you render it, it's still rounded in the final image.

I've included screenshots for box created in Houdini, and box created in Maya, to illustrate what I mean.

My question is, how do I fix the rounded face, so that it appears to be perfectly flat, just like the box created in Maya? Is there a setting some where I've missed?

Thank you, for your insights and guidance.


Edward.

Hi Edward,

you should have a look at the facet-sop -> cusp polygons.
This will generate normals that are not shared at the corners/edges.

Links to the online help:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini11.0/nodes/sop/facet [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini11.0/nodes/sop/edgecusp [sidefx.com]
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini11.0/model/points [sidefx.com]

Cheers

… and be sure to checkout the example files (at the bottom of the help pages).

be careful with cusp in facet or edgecusp since they will split the edges in order to get hard edge

the best way is to use Vertex SOP
change Keep Normal to Cusp Normal and set angle

Vertex SOP will just create vertex attribute N and will not change the topology as other mentioned methods

Be also careful if you decide to go with vertex normals instead of point normals. It's easy to overwrite your normals if you create point normals later on.

What I do is usually work in flat shaded or hidden line mode and then set my normals just at the very last moment, often before the last render null.

Welcome to Houdini!

I think that might be because you have your view port shading set to smooth, whereas Maya's might be in ‘flat’. If you put Houdini's to flat, you should see that is just the opengl drawing, I believe.

Maya's display defaults to smooth, but boxes are created with cusped vertex normals.