Hey there,
Can anyone tell me how (if possible at all) would one access Houdini “scene material”?
The default grey mat. every imported object inherits seems to be a very elusive feature. Am I missing something?
As always, googled it before posting, but nothing relevant surfaced as far as I was able to figure.

It's this:

HOUDINI_VEX_DEFAULT_SURFACE := ‘opdefVop/defaultshader’

it used to be the shop plastic but looks like it has been updated to the Mat context.

OK, I was hoping to be able to modify it in Houdini interface and save it as default instead of setting env. var.

But since it seems that I have to do this, I might as well spread myself thin here and learn how to deal with Houdini env var.
So, I've searched in my file manager for “defaultshader” and it returned one single file with no extention in \houdini\config\Dialogs\VOP\ no .vfl or .vex with that name.

What am I missing?
Also, the help on env. var. is pretty sketchy http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/basics/config_env#setting-environment-variables [www.sidefx.com]

I'm not sure what's changed afaik Mat context is just shops with a prepender to make it more seamless when you drag nodes to the viewport.

If you're just looking to change the default viewport material, there are some display options in the Effects tab which allow you to change the various colors.

Thanks for the info, that might come in handy some time, but I'm not looking to just change how objects look in vp. I'd like all the objects that I create or import to inherit a specific/custom material. It's not awfully inconvenient to select them and assign the mat I want afterwards, it's just that I was hoping to able to get away with not doing this extra step.
BTW, my expectation comes from, you guessed it, where in every scene there's a “scene material” (named exactly like this IIRC) which gets assigned to every new object you create/import (object duplication being an exception). This mat has a simple phong shader connected to the surface input, so if this feature ever gets into H, principled, classic, w/e will the trend be at that time will be just dandy.

In that case, you could add the material path to the Object Material parameter and do “RMB > Make Current Value Default”.

Yep, that works. Thanks!