Simple play icon Course
Skills Expanded

Creating Custom Shaders in Houdini

by John Moncrief

In this Houdini tutorial, we'll explore under the hood of a shading network. Software required: Houdini 15.

What you'll learn

In this Houdini tutorial, we'll explore under the hood of a shading network. We'll start by creating our first simple shader from scratch using the basic Surface Model. We'll see how to promote parameters and build an artist friendly user interface for our shader. Next we'll add displacement to our shader and learn how to bring properties from our geometry into the shading network so that we can develop a dynamically changing surface. By the end of this Houdini training, you'll be able to create your own custom shaders. Software required: Houdini 15.

About the author

John is the resident Houdini and dynamics author at Pluralsight. In college, he had the opportunity to work at SideFX (the creators of Houdini) and has been able to teach dynamics and visual effects to numerous creative industry professionals over the years. He lives for the rush of seeing his pupils experience "light bulb" moments. John's latest passion has been breathing new life into the Pluralsight Houdini training library and making sure that no software or tools can get in the way of an ar... more

Ready to upskill? Get started