本Houdini教程是由cmiVFX机构出品的Houdini阴影与渲染视频教程，时长：3小时32分，大小：556.36 MB，MP4高清视频格式，教程使用软件：Houdini，官方发布日期：2009年7月15日，语言：英语。CG数据库整理。

随着Houdini的Mantra渲染器在产业化制作中得到越来越多的应用,如何快速的制作材质与渲染已经成为最多HOUDINI新手希望 CMIVFX提供的教学主题了.CMIVFX也就针对这些经常碰到的问题录制了一套综合的教学,因此大家就看到了这个高强度,快节奏的课程.包含了 Mantra里面的灯光,材质与渲染内容.本教学包含了

材质入门-它是优先于渲染过程的一个重要步骤,我们可以在HOUDINI中用多种方法来制作它,但找到一个折衷的方法是非常重要的.

材质进阶-让大家深入的学习如何将材质制作的更真实.了解材质的实现流程是很重要的. HOUDINI已经将程序化流程扩展到了它自身的各方面,包括材质网络. 因此了解到它是如何应用到对象表面上是很重要的.你不但能够使用vops来通过代码编写材质, Houdini还能让你用一种独特的方法来编译材质.

渲染工具-Houdini还有其他的一些提高你工作效率的工具, 你将学习到诸如区域渲染工具,渲染视图,MPlay,选择节电与输出驱动,对比工具等一系列的内容. 它将能帮助你对工作流程进行优化.

Houdini 是一个特效方面非常强大的软件。许多电影特效都是由它完成：指环王中“甘道夫”放的那些“魔法礼花”，还有“水马”冲垮“戒灵”的场面，后天中的龙卷风等等，a52的汽车广告，反正只要是涉及DD公司制作的好莱坞一线大片，几乎都会有Houdini参与和应用。

cmiVFX Houdini Shading and Rendering

Introduction to Materials

A very important step prior to the rendering process is defining the aspects of the surface of your objects. This action is achieved in a wide variety of ways in Houdini and is crucial to start somewhere neutral. Learn how you can create materials and how you can assign them to your objects as well as components.

Materials In Depth

To have a deep understanding of what makes a material believable, its important to understand the materials pipeline. Houdini extends its procedural workflow into all aspects of the application including shading networks. Its important to know the many ways of application to surfaces. In addition to that, Houdini lets you compile the shaders inside of it in a unique way. It lets you not only write shaders with code but with visual blocks called vops as well. Knowing that, the artist will need to have options, and we will go through these options on how to create better, proper materials for your objects.

Rendering Tools

Houdini has a lot of rendering tools that can benefit its users when working. We explore different tools like the render region tool, render view, MPlay, render nodes or output drivers, comparison tools and more. This will allow the artists workflow to be optimized for speed. Waste less time performing long test renders and spend more time tuning your look.

Introducing The Project

We create real projects at cmiVFX and we are happy to delve deep into a project that utilizes almost all of the rendering technology in Houdini. In this section, the project is introduced. The final result of this project is discussed as well as its modeling and UV sets used in the scene.

Direct And Indirect Lighting

The rendering process as a whole, is about calculating the interaction of the lighting in the scene and outputting the result. Knowing about light and its physical properties is a very important step to understanding how to work out lighting inside any software. Understanding direct and indirect light is discussed in length with charts and graphs.

Translucent Materials

In order to get to the next level of lighting calculations comprehension, We will show the methods of normal propagation for surface shading using the information gathered earlier. This resulting data helps create a translucent material inside Houdini.

Global Illumination

With the information gathered so far about the importance of the indirect illumination we`ll go trough different ways to create indirect illumination inside Houdini, like the VEX global illumination light shader, PBR, photon mapping . etc, and also talk about one of the methods on how you can have indirect illumination on a per object basis. Let’s investigate Image Based Lighting and how you can convert an image to the .rat format preferred by Mantra. Next, how to apply indirect illumination and light linking.

Simple Materials

This section is geared to guide you on how to apply your created materials to the main project, finishing the lamps surface shaders, then working on the materials that do not need texturing for other objects in the scene.

Texturing

Once you have created UV’s for geometry you can assign procedural or image based textures to surfaces. This task and others, like creating the corresponding materials for our objects and texturing them will be covered in a step by step method. Understanding COP networks to modify an image, then use the output as a texture for one of the materials is a focus in this portion of the video.

Displacement

Displacement mapping is a very important way to add details to your objects without high resolution modeling. Having a good grip on how to create some displacement shaders for materials is essential. Navigate through shader view and use important parameters like the displacement bound and true displacements.

Finishing Touches, Sampling In Mantra And Rendering The Scene

Fine tuning and looking good.. That is what this chapter is all about. What makes a shader and light good and final?. Working on finishing touches, like adding some objects to reflect in our render, adding some lights, making some reflections and light linking and many other subjects compose the final touches of a our project. Mantra is a powerful rendering engine, one of the best in the industry, but as any other beasts it need to be mastered. Knowing how to manage samples from the inside out is a phenomenal for fine tuning your scenes. We are going to look deep into how Mantra manages samples, also as an additional bonus we will have an overview on how Depth of Field works in Mantra to achieve our final result.

About The Author

Georges Nakhle, lebanese, and has a masters degree in mechanical engineering. he has a wide artistic and scientific knowledge, he began his art steps with traditional painting and sculpting then gained a diploma in dramatic monologue (acting -singing), he has worked as a writer and perfomer in radio and TV. combining arts and science led him to CG, so he mastered many tools including Maya and Houdini among others, he’s also a programmer so he’s currently working for Dassault Systemes in Paris-France and he had also worked in combination between Dassault-Systemes and Mental Images the makers of mental-ray. He is very picky about the details and he believes that every small detail contributes to the finished product.