Can anyone tell me how I can change the background colour in Houdini?
I mean the actual output colour not the working environment colour.

please!



thanks

If you're rendering to mplay, type “d” to open the Display options dialog. Under the Viewport tab, set the Background Color then Apply, or Save as Default if you want, then Accept.

You should have a row of buttons on the right of the mplay window if not, Ctrl+RMB & select “Display Options”. Then turn on the “Toggle Transparency” button (third from bottom).

Cheers!
steven

I cannot find Background colour under viewport when I am in SOP & OBJ mode. I can only see “display Ortho grid”, “showname”, “show camera name”….. and “Level of Detail”, “Aspect Ratio”……. (already under viewport)

in the display option> background
I can see “image source”, “3d viewport”, “texture viewport” but i cannot find anything about background colour.

I sometimes find Houdini's help is not helpful. Quite difficult to search and not too many examples.

I get frustrated to just do this simple task! This is already my second night to find a way to just to change the background colour.

I am currently using Houdini 6.0.

There isn't an interface to control the BG colour of the OpenGL windows, apart from Display Options/Background/Color Scheme - which is a toggle between light and dark. The default is more Maya-like, but I like having a black BG - so I use dark. This is saved as an overall pref in your $HOME, so all sessions will be like that, regardless of the hip file you load. Look for that popup selector.

You can also put down a Color COP in a network and reference that from the display options - but that's not the same thing of course.

Finally, there's a messier way - in $HFS/houdini/config there's a file 3DSceneColors that contains a BackGroundColor value. If you copy that to the equivalent location in $HOME/houdini6.x, it should respect that. Like I said - no GUI to this.

As far as the help - yup it could be a little better, but it's improving. Personally when I'm learning a new app I wouldn't spend that amount of time for something so esthetic - I would have posted here and just moved on to save time. Someone here would have come to your rescue… These apps are complicated, many options - not everything is(or should be!) in your face. I must agree that having a consistent interface to this would be nice, though…it's become divergent from the network interface…

Cheers,

J.C.