There are quite a lot of Rman Standard shader in SHOP but the problem is I do not know how I can connect the texture(or pattern that I created in VEX builder e.g.bricks) into the shop standard rman shaders.

Can somebody pls help me? Any help will be highly appreciated!

I think sideEffects should build a new Tutorial section about Rman in Houdini (with vex builder). otherwise it will be very hard for beginners to learn!

brucelay
There are quite a lot of Rman Standard shader in SHOP but the problem is I do not know how I can connect the texture(or pattern that I created in VEX builder e.g.bricks) into the shop standard rman shaders.

Shaders are not VOPs and VOPs are not shaders.

VOPs are used to *define* a shader – they allow you to “write” SL code in a more friendly visual way, and saves you from having to learn the syntax, etc. But if a shader was already written in “raw” SL to begin with, which is the case with the default Rman SHOPs, then there's no automatic way to express that code in the form of VOPs – outside of looking at the SL code and manually duplicating it with VOPs. This is also true with VEX and Mantra: IOW, this is not something related to using Rman instead of Mantra.

In fact, even though I've never used Slim, I think you can think of VOPs as a Slim template, and SHOPs as Slim's output – and that's a one-way street (i.e: you can't generate a Slim template from raw SL AFAIK)

So to add your brick pattern to a pre-existing Rman SHOP you'd have to:

1. Duplicate the SHOPs functionality using VOPs and then replace or add anything you like.
2. Stuff the SHOP's SL code into an Inline VOP and provide the necessary inputs to hook in your new pattern.

Either way requires some manual intervention on your part.

Cheers!