Octane Uber Shader, for Houdini Octane Render

Octane Uber Shader Ver. 1.0

The octane uber shader was created as a solution to the repetitive, inefficient- need to build a shader network from scratch whenever you are lookdev'ing  in octane.

The shader was designed, and built, upon production oriented principles. It will continue to improve in the future alongside the Octane for Houdini plugin. The shader has been in production for over a few months now with fantastic reception among lookdev, and lighting artists.

-Robust

•      Almost all physical materials can be represented by the Uber Shader without the need to use the node graph or overtly complex texturing mixing.

-Clean

•      Ditch the node graph for a clean and easy to learn layout. Understand at a glance what your complex shader is doing. If you are passing or recieving  these shaders to another artists they will understand exactly what is happening without an hour of navigating the node graph.
  

-Fast

•    Use the included bundle of shader presets and tiled textures to create most common shaders.

•       No Nodes means your only spending time on the shader's look and     quality.

•      Included video tutorial will get you and your studio up and running quickly.

•     Open/unlocked Shading network for customization and improvements.
  

Features at a glance:

-Available shader types for mixing.

•  Base Shader (Diffuse or Glossy)
•  2nd Shader ( Glossy)
•  3rd Shader( Specular )

-3 Shader mixing modes

• Blend Mix
  
• Textured Mix
  
• Fresnel Mix
  

"Surface Globals"

• Define  bump, normal, displacement, opacity, and UV Xform- independent from desired shader mix. This prevents the need to configure surface inputs for each shader in the mix. For more control each shader has normal, bump and UV  "global overrides" to input separate surface-params, per-shader.
  

Diagnostic Mode

Visualize individual shaders or just the surface globals without affecting your parameters. Quickly understand and see what each shader is contributing to the final output.

Fresnel Colors

• Define each color input with a zero Degree face -color and a 90 Degree face color. Control the blend of the two with Falloff skew- which is like a IOR value.
  

Texture Inputs:

• Color Correct inputs standard.
  
• Color Correct textures based on Fresnel Curve.
•  UV Xform per texture.
  
• UV projection standard.
  

Dirt Colors

• Blend AO-dirt over color or texture inputs.
  

Instance Variation

• Add color variation to instances with gradient color inputs. Gang-variation inputs to a single gradient to unify different inputs per instance. (ie: "Make Spec variation the same as diffuse.")

• Emission standard on diffuse shader

What you Get:

Initial Release:

Uber Shader with unlocked node networks

Introductory Training video

Additional improvements, bug fixes and future releases.

Custom Shader-Ball

Bonus : Custom Lookdev Scene with calibrated Light, Scale, And color reference.

Unique Tiled Textures for upcoming PBR presets.

2nd Release -coming shortly after intial release.(a week or two)

Large Preset Library with unique tiled textures. Scatched, Galvinzed, Brushed, Polished, Dirty --Metals and Plastics. Wax, Carpaints, Wood, Leather, Megascans Preset, Substance Designer Preset.

Complete Uber shader Training video covering the creation of complex presets such as realistic car paint.

Future Improvements Planned:

UI refinement and functionality

Support for Custom Attributes, if possible.

Conversion To HDA

Installation instructions:

Note: The uber shader was created with octane for Houdini  ver 3.03 in houdini 15.523

Copy Gallery file into scanned gallery folder for Houdini , which is usually located in .... \Documents\houdini15.5\gallery

Getting Started:

Once the gallery file is added to the houdini scanned directory, restart houdini. Goto the Material Palette and under the "Surface Shader" category you should see octane uber. Drag this into your shop and switch to the shop network view and you will see the shader there.

and finally learn the shader by watching this...https://vimeo.com/180628787

Support:

Sending a screenshot or video of a bug will allow bug fixes to happen much faster.

For feature requests or bug reports email me

Thanks for your support!

About Me:

I'm currently an Artist/Technical Director at Roof Studio in NYC.