Question regarding Houdini Shader-s (Textures from Mari)

#1

Hello,

I have a question regarding Houdini shaders.

I am painting my textures in Mari (Never go pass the texture paintings to look dev phase as my previous PC was not so good and caused my PC to crash EVERY time i tried to assign shader to model)
Now i have stronger PC and i am able to work with shaders as i study on my own many questions arise.

For example:

  1. I sculpted dagger in zbrush

  1. I retopo for model is done
  2. UV-s for model are done
    Here for example is dagger handle where you can see UV-s

But this arises questions regarding texturing and shaders
I can texture model in Mari but how about assigning shaders to materials?
For example dagger has root parts (tree element,texture) it also has bone part (bone element, texture) and then there is the metal part (blade)
Those elements as i understand cant have same shader and same time have different effect.

Blade has glossyness but tree part or bone part wont
Bone part will have a bit like sub surface while tree part wont.
How would you approach this?
Note i do not want to make cheap looking textures as i see often many artist do in substance painter (drag drop material on to the pollygroup and done)

Roots on blade are sculpted in to the blade (should separate those and have em as separate obj?)

#2

The easiest way would be to use group and material SOPs. Just add the polys that you want to a group, then attach a material SOP to define which group gets which material.

#3

He,

Thank you for reply.
But what if i have model and same OBJ file has to have different type of shader or effect on different area?

As assigning shader to specific model may work but has limitations.
Separate polygons i understand cant have textures going smoothly over from one object to another.
Like here for example:
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/1V8xq

As you see burned area goes smoothly over to non burned area.
I want to create similar way for my dagger (blade part and roots part)
Roots will have a bit moss on it.

#4

To do that kind of blending, I think you’d need to do some custom shader work. Here’s a link video talks about blending materials in H16:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e14kHmVSbIc

It’s a lot to digest and the video might make it seem more complicated than it really is, but that seems to be the nature of Houdini.