diya

Thanx very much for taking your time dobe, and DaJuice, too. It's clearer for me now how things work in Houdini, it's always mentioned that there are many different ways to do things, but I see they are also different from other softs around.

The idea and the scene file is cool, as DaJuice mentioned the biggest problem for me was to “get/import values of the displace VOPs into the surface context”.

—"A gradient ramp vop with multiple inputs would be nice,"

That's for sure, I'm very surprised that there is none..

Again thanks all,

Diya.

Hi DaJuice, no problem. I made them in Lightwave3d and Softimage-XSI. I'm currently a Lw user, and its texturing method is very basic and straight forward. For example you model a geometry (like the valleys and peaks), enter its surface color texture attributes, apply a gradient layer that is based on a distance from object's origin or a null if you like, enter the ‘range’ value in meters (it should be the distance between the lowest and the highest point of your geometry, logically) and apply ‘color keys’ to your desired heights. For example you can say start as white in 0 meters, turn blue at 10 meters and become yellow between 15 and 25 meters, so on… Lw3D is layer based and you append layers that calculates (adds, multiplies, subtracts etc.) their preceding layers.

I made the same effect in XSI, which is node based and similar to Houdini. But there you don't even have to enter or calculate the distance values. I've used gradients node appended to texture that creates the displacement or bump, and output the node to the displacement input of the output shader.

I'm sorry I can't upload a picture ‘cause I’ve got no webspace. But the previous effect you made is the same, with a different method.

Thank you again for your interest.

Later,

Diya.

:?

So once more I couldn't find the direct answer that is pointing my problem. Thanks for Dajuice and two others for their great help and taking their time. Now I'm curious about why my question is answerless? Is it that I'm totally in a wrong direction and out of logic with my desired approach, or there's no one in the community tried or used this method before? If it's the first probability, I'd like to know it and totally forget about this and say: “Oooh, it is poosible all in Lw, XSI and Maya but you can't do it in Houdini :? ”

Later,

Diya.