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Checking in after more than 1 year, I was wondering if we finally have the Cop Network \ material network integration...  :)


Hello again after another year has passed,  checking-in because I just got a promotional email from Allegorithmic:
Sadly your Substance license is outdated and you don't have access to a whole lot of important features that our dev team has been implementing.

Could somebody update me regarding the workflow of Substance-Houdini.
How do people actually use it today?

Example of workflow:
I build a complex noise in Substance, then import it into Hou with substance plugin, and further tweak it with the exposed parameters, and finally use the generated noise as density map to spawn particles in the scene.
Can I do that?

This is mainly for the Algorithmic team, but anyone who cares feel free to throw in your thoughts as well :)

I apologise if this has been requested before (I imagine it has)

Correct me if I'm wrong,
this was the first and most popular feature requested by the community. Already requested on day 1.
Few years have passed, while ppl kept coming to the forum to ask for it.

I'm sure Allegorithmic will deliver eventually, hopefully sooner than HL3  ;D




Substance Integrations - Houdini - Re: few basic questions
 on: August 15, 2016, 06:57:27 pm 
Hey thanks for checking it out!
I'm pretty sure at the time of the first post I had the version you used for your test

Now I'm in 15.5.565:  I have no more warnings in console about Mantra unable to load textures..
But still present the problem of distant vs close camera.

With the very same close camera you're using in the screenshot I get this:

while with a more distant camera the scene is rendered but it seems that still some artifacts on the outline are occurring:

I can't understand what kind of artifact is being produced..

Substance Integrations - Houdini - Re: few basic questions
 on: August 10, 2016, 01:14:31 pm 
Thanks a lot Josh,
I've just sent you the files.

One more thing, I after converting the maps to jpgs, now I get this result:

The python should be super simple... drop a python SOP in your network and add the following line:


Thanks a lot grayolorin!

Substance Integrations - Houdini - Re: few basic questions
 on: August 06, 2016, 11:55:00 am 

For the parameter issue, could you do me a favor? could you output the ifd when the substance is bound to the geometry? And could you then create a principled shader, using the substances and parameters you want, and create an ifd from that? I should be able to get us an updated substanceprincipled.cfg from that. Please email this to josh.coyne@allegorithmic.com

As for mantra, I can make some local code changes and send you a plugin build or two via email to see if we can't fix this problem!

Hi Josh,
after some researching on this ifd matter, I realized that apprentice/indie license are not allowed to output ifds. Unfortunately I can't help you with your request  :-\

Let me add a couple of notes that might help to understand the problem:
I managed somehow to extend the problem to all the outputs of the substance. Now console says that mantra is unable to load basecolor.png , metallic.png, etc etc

I've also notice that there's something going on with the distance of the camera from the mesh. When camera is far away I'm able to see "something", on the contrary as the camera approaches the geometry it starts to clip it, eventually resulting in black image. See the screenshot for reference, here the camera is starting to clip the geo.

you can actually accomplish this in a sop network (with cooking)  by using a python SOP to force the substance material to write the textures to disk, then have your attribute VOP read them in via a texture VOP.   Having a COP node would indeed be great as it would open more uses for the substance plug in Such as being able to directly access the COP data into any context.  At that point, you could be using substances to make audio if you wanted to :)  But this workaround should get you working in the meantime

Thanks for tip grayolorin!
I'll try to study houdini-python too (atm I'm getting my hands dirty with vex).
Yes a fully integrated substance plugin would be 360° useful!  (-:

Substance Integrations - Houdini - Re: few basic questions
 on: August 01, 2016, 12:51:00 pm 
hi Josh, thanks again!

1) I tried the parameter you mentioned, but it still produces no result.
At this point if anyone is able to share a simple working Houdini project utilizing the Substance Plugin with displacement (along with substancetopricipled.cfg and .sbar files) would be great!

2) Still the same error with Mantra

This is my scene setup

oh snap! ;\

thanks for the info

Hello there Josh,
thanks for caring!

1) I tried to play with "dispTexScale" and "dispTexOffset", but nothing really changed. Note: I edited the cfg with the Notepad, also I made sure to restart Houdini in order to reload the cfg.

2) As you say it seems impossible to do it, but I expected this feature to be already present in the plugin. Would be so useful :(

3) For testing purposes, I tried to load a super basic substance, only one node ( a checker) and no bitmaps. The viewport is way smoother, but still have some slight  stutters from time to time.

4) I tried to clear my temp folder. Problem is that that file doesn't even exist in the temp folder. Also with the super basic substance (without bitmap images) I get the same error.
I might be doing something wrong in my houdini project (I'm new to the software)

I attached the files I'm using, in case you want to have a clear view of what's going on.

Thanks again for the help!

I attached the file I'm using

Substance Integrations - Houdini - Re: COP node ?
 on: July 21, 2016, 06:57:05 pm 
pardon for the bump,
I don't have any exp with COP, but is this request similar to  point 2 of this more recent topic? https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php?topic=12383.0

In that case, can you confirm that is still not possible to grab/link the outputs of the substance loaded in houdini, to further process them (in vops for example)?

Hopefully somebody came up with some work around..

Substance Integrations - Houdini - few basic questions
 on: July 20, 2016, 12:50:37 am 
Hello there,

I managed to load a basic substance with the following outputs: base color, roughness, normal, metallic and displacement (instead of height which is not recognized).
The substance is displayed correctly onto the object (a basic grid-plane), also the displacement shows up.

Few  questions:
  • how can I access the displacement amount? Is there anywhere in houdini a multiplier for the displacement?
  • how can I access the individual channel outputs of the substance? For example, I need to use the displacement map output of the substance in a attribute vop to drive some calculations, or spawn some particles from the white area. What would be the workflow to access any output of the substance?
  • When the substance is loaded, viewport performance gets really poor with low fps. I guess it has to do with two 4k 16bit bitmap embedded in the substance, making it 26MB in size. Is there any way I can link those bitmap inside houdini into the substance?
  • Also, I get black renders with mantra. Console report the following error:
    mantra: Unable to load texture

thanks for any help

Hello there,
probably I'm missing something stupid, but I can't use Iray anymore.
I'm not able to access the render menu in the 3D view, as it's greyed out.
I've recently upgraded to 5.3.5, Iray preferences are set to GPU.

any advice to fix it?

Hello there,
it seems that Tile Generator is miss behaving in c4d, returning overlapping tiles if fed with an input image.
The same doesn't happen if it's used instead a splatter node, or if tile generator uses one of the internal shape.

Following image shows the problem:

First node: splatter node with shape node as input = returns correct tiling in c4d
Second node: tile  generator with shape node as input = returns wrong tiling (as shown) in c4d
Third node: tile generator with internal pattern = return correct tiling in c4d


maybe a combination of "color to mask" and "channel shuffle" nodes would suit your needs?

What kind of material you're aiming to?

Regarding the shape of the lines, you can use a tile generator to randomly place and rotate some lines then bend them using a dynamic warp filter.

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