Posts Tagged ‘Tutorial

19
Oct
10

Baking occlusion on displaced geometry

I found myself trying to get a lot of different static objects to render with displacement and ambient occlusion. To optimize render times, I wanted to be able to bake the Ambient Occlusion into the objects, all of them coming from Zbrush so I didn´t want to lose the detail from the fine displacements, mostly visible thanks to the occlusion.

To bake a shader (or shaderUnwrap) in Houdini, you have to do what´s called an UV space render.  All you need to do to achieve it is to import the «UV Object» rendering property into your renderer node. Also, make sure that your UVs are set as a vertex attribute.
The problem is: Houdini doesn´t actually supports UV rendering of displaced geometry.

To achieve this, you´ll have to do a little trick (assuming you are working in VOPS):
You have to:
1.copy your displacement shader network and paste it into your surface shader
2.pipe the output of the pasted network into the occlusion node.

PS: The shading workflow has changed a bit in H11 and I haven´t tried this there. I hope this trick isn´t needed anymore, but it surely still works.