How to improve viewport visibility.

By default, meshes in the viewport are illuminated and look like it's the 90s. This is because occlusion is disabled by default. In the video, I show this occlusion checkbox on the second "Headlight only" button. And immediately the model becomes much more readable. The nuance is that this checkbox is not saved in any way. Not in the file, nor in the viewport settings, nor in the desktop settings. No one bothers to turn it on for the 1000th time, and therefore, whenever Houdini is opened, you will always have a poorly visible viewport and you must not forget to go and turn this checkbox on. And remember that the "ambient occlusion" checkboxes under other buttons have no effect without turning on the checkbox under the second button. This is so Houdini-like, but it will confuse other users. It is also useful to reduce the specular roughness to 0.1 and greatly increase the ambient occlusion in the settings by pressing the D key in the "light" section.
The second option is to enable the light environment in obj and put hdri there directly from the folder with houdini, I take this $HFS/houdini/pic/hdri/HDRIHaven_lenong_1_2k.rat.
And this already looks pretty decent. And again, you will have to do this in each file.
And here is a question for the staff - after all, all this could have been enabled by default, the built-in hdri with a button could have been for quick switching on and houdini would not look so miserable. So why is this not so? You already have everything, but it seems like you specially made it so that when you launch houdini looks like an alien from the 90s and the user cannot fix such a default, and configuring it every time is labor-intensive. This is very strange to me.

As a long-time Houdini user, I look past the viewport. I don't waste time programming the viewport, and focus on how my output looks in the final render.

Enivob
As a long-time Houdini user, I look past the viewport. I don't waste time programming the viewport, and focus on how my output looks in the final render.

Many people's output is in the Houdini experience not a render. "Back-in-the-day" rendering took FOREVER so you had no option other than to "look past" the viewport and I don't think much of the parameters in Houdini were even real-time feedback.

It is often part of the process of learning Houdini that you tune the setup. Is is "fun" to have a challenge? Yes! Do I think it would be better with a more humane interface? Yes!

It is very clear to everyone that the interface gets in the way of creativity -- full stop.

It is completely relevant to work on the Viewport experience given the impact is has on contemporary workflows that are greatly intertwined with real-time work.

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PHENOMDESIGN
It is very clear to everyone that the interface gets in the way of creativity -- full stop.

To me that's not true - I find the opposite - Houdini is a tool that enhances and allows me to apply my creativity.

RGaal
So why is this not so? You already have everything, but it seems like you specially made it so that when you launch houdini looks like an alien from the 90s and the user cannot fix such a default, and configuring it every time is labor-intensive. This is very strange to me.

It is not strange to me. You have a desire for many default settings to be different, which is perfectly legitimate.
I don't know if it's possible, but I am wondering can Python not be utilized to set your preferences through a start up script or even a shelf tool to apply after start up.
For people like myself - the defaults are perfectly fine as is. I think that's what one of the main reasons Python is available, not everyone is going to have the same desired defaults - Python allows for the flexibility?

@RGaal. "Save as Default" button in Display Options will preserve modified settings. But, as it's stated in the info dialog:

Houdini
The new defaults will affect only new viewports. Existing viewports loaded from .hip files will not be affected.

So for existing scenes those settings must be modified too.

You can also customize new scene settings in 123.pyscript. See Python script locations [www.sidefx.com] and HOM (this in particular [www.sidefx.com]) for more information.

BabaJ
To me that's not true

I am talking about for others not us individually. I can easily share data on this it is called a UX Audit. The point is for it to not only be useful to a small subset of people but anyone with creative intent.

You seem very out of touch with the creative and learning community.

ajz3d
Save as Default" button in Display Options will preserve modified settings.

The nuance is that it does not save, although it should.
It is enough to close and open Houdini and make sure that the checkbox is removed again.
What is funny is that in Vulkan, despite the disabled setting in the parameters, it is enabled by default in the viewport buttons, but in OpenGL it is always disabled. This is a banal bug, I think, which spoils the already not very good viewport.

BabaJ
For people like myself - the defaults are perfectly fine as is.

For you - maybe. But think about why people are into 3D? Not 2D? People like the feeling of volume, three-dimensionality. And a viewport with bad shading quickly kills enthusiasm and motivation, destroys the dopamine response of the brain. 99.5% of the time we look at a gray viewport and 0.5% at a good render. No render improvements will compensate for the harm from a bad viewport. I watched tutorials of fairly well-known artists who complained that they lose motivation if they look at the Houdini viewport screen for a long time and therefore constantly switched to redshift to get inspired by the volumetric picture of the intermediate render. And I thought, God, I'm not the only one who falls into apathy from this gray screen. And how many noobs lose enthusiasm? And judging by the gray flat tutorials on YouTube, few people know that this viewport can be improved.