i feel like i should be able to find this in the documentation, but i cannot find it anywhere.

I have geometry (with good UVs I think), and a material with texture assigned, but I'm not seeing the texture drawing in the viewports.

Can anyone tell me how to turn this on?

thanks in advance!

It should just work by default unless you've turned it off in the viewer. You can double check the display options by hitting ‘d’ in the viewport and looking in the Misc tab. Which SHOP are you using? Sometimes, the texture map parameter on the OGL tab isn't set up to reference the regular texture map parameter as well. In that case you need to put in a `chs()` reference to the right parameter.

okay, so i hit ‘d’ and display textures is on for the viewport.

For the material, i just dragged "Basic Surface' over to see the icon, then added a Color Map. I know it's assigned because when i change the Base Color, i see the color change in the viewport.

As for the SOPs i'm using, here is the network.

Also, FWIW, when I create a Sphere and assign same material, i see no texture in viewport also (they have UV by default, right? If so, this would indicate problem is not with my geometry/UVs?).

I'm running an ancient Nvidia Gforce 7800 GTX, I wonder if that's the problem?

No primitives have uv's by default in Houdini. You must explicitly create some.

i figured as much, but in this case i can't be “projecting” UV coordinates, i need them to follow the contours of the sweep-polypatch in U, and tile in V.

can you suggest how i would go about doing that?

thanks in advance!

I'd also like to know about this..

For PolyPatch output (Mesh primitive), an easy way is to append a UVTexture SOP and change the Texture Type parameter to Rows & Columns. Note that this also works for NURBS surfaces.

thanks edward,

I tried that and I'm still not seeing the texture. Do you think you might have moment to look at my .hipnc (attached) ?

interestingly, when i assing a UVQuickShade to the end…i see something in viewport (corrupted UV though).

thanks!

Ah, I had assumed you were using one of the default SHOPs. For custom ones, you need to make sure that you have a OGL Texture Layer (ie. in your basic VOP VEX Surface SHOP) that uses the same file. The viewport only looks at those parameters.

Your second problem is that that rows & columns only works for Mesh and NURBS primitives but you had turned on Output Polygons in the PolyPatch SOP. Turning this off gives the correct uv's. Afterwards, you can convert back to Polygons after the texture SOP if you wish (or need to).