For practice, I started to model a Roland RE-201 device that was used as a starting point for Richard Yot's Modo Shader Tutorial. Although Richard Yot's tutorial has an untextured Modo scene file as a starting point, I decided to completely rebuild the model and UV maps myself in Houdini (and build a studio setup and lights) and then see if I could replicate some of the steps he uses in Modo's layer based system in Modo.

As I have found before, modeling in Houdini is really not that much more difficult than modeling in Modo and sometimes easier. The action centers, falloffs, knife tool are hard to find an equivalent in Houdini, but there are no show stoppers. One thing that is much more useful in Modo is the symmetry mode for edge loop cuts. Houdini, like Blender, only allows either one loop cut or evenly spaced multiple cuts on an edge. In hard surface modeling, one frequently wants to do symmetric cuts and not do the math for a 10% cut on one edge and then a 10/9*10% cut on the remaining edge. See attached movie for how Modo's system works: https://vimeo.com/663805858. [vimeo.com] It would be very helpful in someone would make an HDA/otl to solve this common issue.

The second issue is how to best handle the nodes for materials in Houdini. Is it better to start with adding nodes directly into the mat network, or add a material builder node, or dive into a principled shader to do complicated shader work? Is there a good tutorial on layer masking or compositing in materials? I would like to avoid having to set a polygon group, as some of the masking will be unrelated to different polygons.

Hey Island,

I made a hda for the poly split thing. I guess there are much smarter ways to do it, but until then it might help you.
btw. it only works correctly if you select just one polygon in the group field.

Cheers
CYTE

The DoubCut hda is awesome, Philipp!! The split node was clever. This allows me to do things like drive the percent cut based on box axis scale, which was not really possible (to me, at least) with the poly split node. For procedural modeling in particular, this is great.