I am working on the rendering section of the brickify tutorial. I am having issues with the point light. It is not allowing me to place the pivot of the point light and then the target. Any ideas why?

With your cursor over the Stage viewport (cursor location is important when using shortcuts in H) try hitting 'Escape' key and then 'Enter' again. Does it show? Does Shift + F1 show / hide the tool hints?

Hey Mike,

I will need to keep in mind that cursor placement is important. I tried hitting 'escape' then 'enter' but nothing shows again. When I press 'Shift + F1 '. This pops up at the side.

Yes, those tool hints are what you should see with Shift F1.

I'm not sure why you're not seeing the appropriate handles. If you upload your file that might help.

Hey Mike,

Here is the file. Sorry I am brand new to this I really appreciate you taking a look at this.

Annoyingly for you, it works as expected here : )
Your 'brickify asset' was empty on the file I received, but I replaced it with the rubber toy ('Flippy').

I suggest:
Dial down the brightness on the dome light so the scene lighting is quite dim - so you can see the effect of the point light.
Delete the point light and add it again.
Click on the point light in the network view ro make sure it selected, and make sure the blue render flag is also active.
Place cursor over viewport. Are 'Light tool' tips displayed? If not, hit Shift F1.
Along the top of the viewport click on the 'shadow' button.
Click once on the nose of the rubber toy - you should see a blue circle.
Shift click on the ground a little in front of the toy.

You should see something like:


Any joy?

Annoyingly no joy. When I dim the dome light and re-add the point light there is no difference to the light in the scene. Even if turn the intensity up on the point light it makes no difference.

Ummm... OK, I've a feeling I'm missing something simple here : ), but here are a few other things to try:

1. As I couldn't properly load your scene I can't be certain... but is your model very large? The point light you add might be inside the model. Use the light translate controls to move it outside. Also the light intensity may need to be driven far beyond the default slider range of 1 to 10. Try much bigger values. You can use the value ladder over the value to adjust it.

2. I attach a super simple scene you can try. View it in the Solaris desktop. Add a point light where indicated and see if you get the handles for that.

3. You can create a new Houdini scene and menu: File > Merge your old scene into it. Does that fix it?

4. Are your Nvidia graphic drivers up to date?

5. Assuming you're on Windows:
Quit Houdini. Find your User > Documents folder. In there you'll have a "Houdini20.5" folder - which holds your preferences etc. Move that out onto your desktop. Now restart H and a new "Houdini20.5" folder will be automatically created to replace it - giving you fresh preferences. Does that help?
If you want your old preferences back, quit H and copy the original folder over the fresh one, restart H.

Fingers crossed...

Hey Mike!

Thank you so much for all your help. It took doing suggestion number 5 to sort it. I'm assuming I must have changed something in my preferences accidentally if that fixed the issue.


Can't thank you enough!