Hi,

see attached image. What's wrong with the lighting?

Any advise would be great.

Philip

That's happening because Houdini is shading smoothly across all the polygons that make up your walls. What you want to do is put down a Facet SOP and enable Cusp Edges.

Works great, thank you.

thanks! I gave it a try but i dont seem to see any difference

I got it i had to also turn on post compute normals

from what i understand facet and edge cusp split the vertexes. is there another way to get a hard edge without a vertex split?

Hi,

You can refer to this thread [sidefx.com] on how to setup vertex normals.

Cheers!
steven

SpOOkyPaul
from what i understand facet and edge cusp split the vertexes. is there another way to get a hard edge without a vertex split?

To shorten your pain:

the idea is to produce vertex normals in separete pass, because they are not particulary well supported in Houdini at the moment - though play well in Mantra.

You need three nodes:

a) Facet - Unique Points, Post-Compute Normals,
b) AttribPromote - N from Point Class to Vertex Class,
c) Fuse - to delete previously created points

This way normals suitable for vertices were produced for duplicated points, transfered from here on vertices, while unneeded points deleted. Well, you get the point…

cheers,
skk.

thank you guys

…Or on the object level in geometry tab - you can turn off the default settings to “compute automatically normals” of the geometry. Then you don't need to worry anymore about inserting any sops each time you need to get sharp edges (which generally happens modeling architecture). On the other hand rendering smooth surfaces requires similar process described above - recreating normals with a use of facet sop.