Hi,

I'm working through examples in the Ari Danesh next step tutorials - this one M12 video.

In it he goes to the shop network and drops down a Material Shader Builder node then goes into that node.

Up to this point I have no problem doing the same.

But then while in the shader builder he drops down a Two Tone “node” through the TAB menu.

The problem is that in my TAB menu there is no Two Tone “node” available.

I think he is using Houdini 12 and I am using Houdini 15.

I went to my help menu and apparently it's still there because it gives a description of it ( Two Tone ).

So I'm not sure how to get a two tone node or an equivalent in order follow along with the tutorial any further.

Any help is appreciated.

Yeah, Houdini is not very backwards compatible. Forget old tutorials and view the most recent ones first. There are some nice new tutorials on the H15 principled shader on vimeo.

https://vimeo.com/goprocedural/videos [vimeo.com]

Good suggestion Enivob and thanks for the link.

twotone VOP is still there, but it is hidden using the ophide Vop towtone command in H15.


To unhide the towtone VOP and continue your tutorial, you can open a Houdini text port and type:

opunhide Vop twotone

Now you can tab-type towtone and add the twotone VOP.

Fyi, you can type in to the Houdini textport: ophide Vop and return to see the list of all the hidden nodes.


The comment: “Houdini is not very backwards compatible” is very much incorrect in it's vast scope.
The statement above by Enivob must be qualified to “tutorials with default Houdini” wrt backwards compatibility. That I can agree with. Wrt the general aspect of his comment, sorry Enivob, you are wrong. Following the latest Houdini tutorials is fantastic advice and agree with that as well.


As far as Houdini is concerned, opening up legacy files from many releases ago should be possible because we do deprecate most operators by hiding them using the ophide command. This is remarkable compared to all the other dcc software in this industry. There may be parameter warnings but for most cases, this can be ignored and legacy files will load.

The twotone VOP was deprecated and hidden as it is not compatible with PBR rendering since it is running an illuminance loop and is doing it's own shading computation internally.

In H15, we deprecated a lot of VOPs because of this. This goes against the current shader construction philosophy where you have your BXDF type VOPs and you feed in patterns then mix the BXDF's together. Patterns shouldn't compute lighting in the current VOP world.

We also added a Cartoon Shader that does the equivalent of the twotone VOP but is compatible with PBR render engine.

Thanks for this Info Jeff.