Hey everyone,

I've been painting and manipulating many attributes as of late, and it occurred to me that sometimes it can be quite tricky to view the data in the viewport.

Based on my observations, it appears that the openGL shading models that are availabe to choose from, all include some sort of diffuse, and specular component - which are based on normals - which are, quite often, anything but “normal” to the surface - the end product of this is having to tumble the geometry in all sorts of fantastical ways just to get a sense of what's going on .

I know that one can disable specular highlights, but that still leaves the diffuse component, which combined with not-quite-so-normal Normals, results in much carpal tunnel for yours truly.

There is also the Hidden line mode, which comes close, but again, since it's only applying color to the wireframe, it's hard to read.

My suggestion is something like the constant illumination model, which passes Cd directly to the viewport.

Thoughts?

Hey Gene, I agree, it can be a pain when visualizing attribs.. I would love to see something like this as well, but as for now, you could try and fake it by creating a temp camera and point your geometry's normals directly at it. then just be sure to tumble around while the cams locked to view.

i whipped up an otl that does just this and put it on the exchange if your interested.. I still realize this isn't the best solution and there should be something much much better, but maybe this will help it a little until then..

http://www.sidefx.com/exchange/info.php?fileid=239&versionid=239 [sidefx.com]

hth,
dave

If you turn off use lighting on the ogl tab of your shader then all colours look constant. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to effect attribute coloring only the general diffuse color from the shader.
However if you are painting attributes using Cd it seems to respect that.
To get it to work at sop level apply a shader with the use lighting turned off using a shader sop before you start painting.

Hope this helps

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this gents.

All valid points.

I suppose my point of contention is “number-of-clicks” more then anything else. Attributes, imho, are fundumental to the workflow in Houdini, and hence deserve a little more love.

Not that i'm whining mind you, Houdini is flexible enough to accomodate building a solution should you need it, i'm just saying…

Ok… I guess I AM being whiny… :wink:

Juggling attributes into and out of Cd, from their respective places and possibly non-normalized ranges… creating cameras… reorienting normals… assigning shaders, and ultimately, the very act of having to display (after having to searched for) a different SOP for this purpose, is in-and-of-itself indicative that there's an oppurtunity to tighten up the workflow.

Maybe I just need more coffee. :shock:

Cheers,

G

I totally agree, it's rather hidden functionality which is too fundamental to be hidden. I would also like to see an option to display attribute values as actually values right in the viewport like you can with uv's etc.

Actually, just testing using a shader and no lighting selected, if you use a paint sop and select override color with your own attribute then the Cd and your own attribute are kept in sync so there is no need to be renaming any attributes.

I've added a user note to the paint sop for future reference.

yea, i definately don't think it's whining.. it's something i wish could be done in one click (i.e. go from shaded mode to ‘constant’ mode).. handling otls, making sure they're installed, reorienting normals.. all just pain.. a workaround, but still a pain..

simon's suggestion is much easier and faster and luckily the paint sop will manage it all.. but still there's creating the shader, turning lighting off in opengl, laying down shader sop above sops in network, rewire in and view..

i kind of always felt this way about viewing geometry with transparency while modeling.. create a shader, down the alpha in opengl, apply shader sop, put at top and rewire in.. would be kind of nice to just see it as a display option..

so in the end, i'm whining for two new display options : constant and transparent..