Hello SESI.
I hope you are doing well. Both you and I have been a long time together and we both know how many times people new to Houdini have asked at this forum about layered shaders.

We also know it can be done playing with VOPs or “tricked” with COPs aka compositing, yet we both know it would be better to have a stock shader that did it.
We even know it is rather unfair to expect from someone new to Houdini to get into VOPs early on and adapt their custom shader.

As an instructor I find it difficult to justify to my students (who already know other 3d apps) such an obvious omission on the stock gallery.

Maybe we could do something at this respect, or will I have to create something myself for my students? I already have a lot of work! :cry:

Best wishes.

Or as an alternative, should someone create something like this and upload it to orbolt, SESI could approach them asking to include it in the main package. If the specific user isn't willing then so be it but im sure many would be happy to have their creations included in a build of Houdini.

talking about texture layers I would be up for built in approach with dynamic number of layers, which you can rearrange and change blending mode(something like enhanced Composite VOP) rather than just an asset you can build in few minutes
(it's not on top on my list though as I don't mind building them custom per material so far it would be nice addition though)

the whole different thing is layered shaders/materials, which cannot be done right now (at least not with all the AOVs) and it would be very nice to have that functionality as well, especially on SHOP level

but I don't think that new users should be spared of VOPs, VOPs are the most powerful context in houdini and you need to know it more than many other things. If you have a look at other softwares, node based shader building is simply the standard, so why don't do it that way?

I must admit though, that VOPs themselves could get some love in next releases especially after last version's addition of the pyro nodes which in my opinion are confusing with their UI hooks and introduce lot of parameter linking inside of the VOPnet which forces it to recompile and is painfully slow to tweak that way, hopefully that is not where the VOPs are heading, but that's another topic

Just to clarify, I don´t think new users should be spared of any VOP knowledge, either. I do teach them VOPs.
I just want to teach VOPs gradually and whenever I think it´s the more appropiate time for their learning experience, and not forced because it´s unavoidable. Specially for such a simple need.