Houdini: Groom viewport lighting and shading template

Tired seeing your grooms with constant shaded root to tip color in your Houdini viewport?

Then look no further!

This little template adds some fine tuned lights, shaders and display settings to supercharge your grooming preview to look close to what you would expect from a offline render preview.

A workflow that I like to utilize heavily to save precious time and get your groom tasks through the finishing line way faster!

Here the quickstart steps:

1. File/Merge the provided hiplc file into your houdini scene and hide all other lights you already had in your scene
2. Scale and Move your groom to fit into the provided box. This is important since the lights cone angles are tightly wrapped around the cube so to harness as much of the shadow resolution as possible. I had difficulties getting this look with smaller world scales.
3. With your mouse cursor in the viewport press the d key on your keyboard to open the "Display Options" and apply the settings under the sceene and lights tab as seen in the screenshots provided
4. Assign the principledshader_hair_brown or principledshader_hair_black hairgen

And this should be it!

The provided file is made with Houdini indie so if you want it for your full Houdini version as a hip file you will need to recreate the setup node for node unfortunately. But since it's a rather simple setup it should be fairly easy.

It seems that it requires a lot of tweaks to make the light rig to work for other world scales so in a future update I will look into providing multiple setups for different scales.

Created in Houdini 18.5 and tested to work in 19 and 19.5.

I believe earlier versions should work too but hasn't been tested.

PS: there seems to be a bug that breaks the preview of the hairs turning them white if you dive into your hairgen. You can try to scrub in your timeline to see if that fixes it since I've animated a parameter on the principled shader that in most cases fixes it when you go back out of your hairgen. Otherwise I would recommend to make a bug report with sidefx to get it sorted.

Please feel free to get in touch if you have feedback or questions!

Enjoy!