Hi Folks.

Just a quick question… I am studying Houdini using the Apprentice Edition, considering moving to the Indie version. One area I'm finding time consuming is applying a texture to a model. In previous 3D software I have used, you could select some polygons, name them, and then apply a texture to the named surface using planar, cubic, cylindrical, or spherical modes, and the texture would be applied to the polygons with that named surface. It was quick, simple, effective, and powerful.

UV mapping on the other hand is very time consuming. You have to UV unwrap the model, get a good UV covering on your object, create the UV texture map, and then spend time aligning the polygons of the UV map to the parts of the image of the UV texture image.

Where the apply texture to surface method takes only a few seconds, doing UV texturing can take quite a few minutes, tens of minutes, even running into an hour on more complex models.

Does Houdini offer the apply texture to named polygons method, or is it just UV mapping all the way? This is not a deal-breaker for me in regards to Houdini if it is only UV mapping, I just want to know is there a quicker way to toss a texture onto a model/parts of a model, without having to deal with the tedious task of UV mapping.

I made a couple of tutorials on the various UV nodes in Houdini which can make quick work of the type of things that you mention.



IMHO Houdini is second to none when it comes to UV creation.

Houdini can use uv projections for uv's. There's the UV Project node. triplanar mapping is another quick way to texture with repeating patterns.

Thanks very much for the replies, these really do help me out and make working with Houdini's UV's less daunting. Very much appreciated!!