show material properties in viewport

[Jon3D]

is it possible to show the material properties (diffuse, refl.,...) in viewport when working with a material builder?

[chakarov]

The V-Ray Material Builder VOP has "Viewport Shading" tab, there are some textures and properties which are supported in viewport. Do you need other properties/textures?

[Jon3D]

thank you for the fast reply.

Yes there are some parameters for textures. They only work with textures right? If you have a shader in a Material Builder with just a VrayColor as diffuse it will not show in viewport.

I need some basic Material properties like diffuse color, reflection, glossiness, refraction/opacity but without the need to use textures for that.

Edit: I just saw that the vray material complex has this possibilities. How could that be applied to the normal material builder? Is this some hidden code that has to be implemented on your side ?

[Jon3D]

chakarov Did you have a chance to look at it?

[Gosho.Genchev]

Hey Jon3D ,

The simplest solution would be to make yourself a digital asset that exposes the OpenGL parameters you're interested in, and hook them up to the corresponding V-Ray material parameters. You can open the spare parameters window and search for "ogl" under the "Render Properties" tab. This is the best part about Houdini - you can customize everything to your own needs.



There is no way for us to do this universally for all V-Ray material nodes unless we wrap everything in HDAs similar to the Principled Surface - on one hand this will help with Viewport previews but on the other, it will make things much harder for the artists that want low-level control and the ability to build their own assets.
We've tried very hard to improve IPR rendering so the viewport preview is less of an issue. If you're having major trouble with IPR and thus want to rely on the OpenGL viewport preview, please ping us so we can take a look. There are some edge cases where IPR support is not possible and the render needs to be restarted but for the most part, it should do the job - we even have support for motion blur and displacement updates there which you don't get with OGL.

Hope that helps!

[Jon3D]

Ah thank you very much. Thats helps. Yes Sure the ability for low level controls is more important, also for me. I forgot about the ogl parameters. Thanks again for that hint.