mattmerk

I am a new Houdini user who has been doing 3D CGI since 1994. So far everything in Houdini makes sense to me and I wish I had begun using it sooner.

One area still has me flummoxed. In nearly any other 3D app (that supports it), doing displacement mapping with any old input, either procedural or a bitmap, requires barely a couple mouse clicks and they all work in pretty much the same way: pipe the luminance of your map (bitmap or procedural) into the displacement channel of a shader and voila, displacement!

In Houdini, I can't even make it work. I can get bitmaps to work. I can even get any of the built in displacement nodes, burlap, cavities, cellular cracks, etc., to displace my geometry at render time (sort of…mostly).

But what if I wanted to use a procedural map, like wood, stone wall, or stripes, or even better, the results of something from the built in houdini compositor? I just can't seem to make the cognitive leap necessary to figure this out and would appreciate any help.

I was launching the houdini escape app, instead of apprentice. All is good now.