(Resolved) Using masks generated in SOP's as masks in material?

[Monkeybrother]

Complete newbie question: I've used VRay (Max, Maya) for many years, but I'm finally trying out Houdini. I'm doing a procedural landscape that has a lot of heightfield masks in the SOP, and I'd like to use them in different ways in the material. How can I do that? I found solutions for Mantra and Redshift, but those seem to be specific to those renderers. Any help appreciated.

[glacierise]

You generate geometry in SOP - it's information written on attributes of the points, vertices or volumes, like maybe in your case with height fields, which are a 2D volume. To use this in the shader, you need to call that attribute, one way is using the vray user color node, it has attribute options. I think you can't render the height field directly yet, you gotta convert to a mesh first.

[Monkeybrother]

You generate geometry in SOP - it's information written on attributes of the points, vertices or volumes, like maybe in your case with height fields, which are a 2D volume. To use this in the shader, you need to call that attribute, one way is using the vray user color node, it has attribute options. I think you can't render the height field directly yet, you gotta convert to a mesh first.

Thanks. Like I said, I'm a complete newbie when it comes to Houdini, would you possibly have an example of how that works? I can render the heightfield in VRay, I just need to access the masks from the SOP.

[chakarov]

like glacierise said highfields are 2D volumes. Unfortunately there is no way, for now, to use them directly. But when convert the heighfield into a poly object, Houdini will promote the mask volume as float point attribute. Check the example bellow.

[Monkeybrother]

like glacierise said highfields are 2D volumes. Unfortunately there is no way, for now, to use them directly. But when convert the heighfield into a poly object, Houdini will promote the mask volume as float point attribute. Check the example bellow.

Thank you! I've been trying different things for days, but I never put the material network in the SOP before. One last question: this only promotes one mask - how can I get several masks?

Edit: nevermind, heightfield_copylayer->edit that layer worked. Thanks again.