Compiling a VRAYprocedural example

Compiling a SOP

After you have copied the samples folder from $HFS/toolkit/samples it is time to try and compile one of the examples. It is a little bit easier to compile a normal sop rather than a VRAYprocedural, so let’s do that first. The SOP_Star.C is easy to test.

cd $HOME/dev/houdini11.0/samples/SOP
hcustom SOP_Star.C

This will create SOP_Star.so in $HOME/houdini11.0/dso which is the default where hcustom will put plugins for most nodes. VRAYprocedurals are not loaded by houdini, but are loaded by mantra. They should be put in:
$HOME/houdini11.0/dso/mantra
If all went well, you should be able to start up a new houdini and inside of a geometry node, lay down a star sop. A change to a plugin requires you to restart houdini. However changing a VRAYprocedural does not require you to restart houdini as it is loaded by mantra and mantra is only called when you launch a render.

How does it all link together?

A flowchart of the VRAYprocedural connections

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Getting started

Help!

Often the hardest thing is getting started. So I’m going to try and lay out plain and simple how I started and where to look for things. The goal for this post is to provide you with as much information on how to compile your first VRAYprocedural. You might already know a lot of this info as it can be found in the documentation or scattered on the forums, but let’s start easy and expand from there. Talking about documentation, Sidefx has added some pretty decent documentation online and you will be browsing through them often (bookmark!): General Houdini documentation and HDK specific documentation. There is also a bunch of good info on the odforce wiki.

On a side note, if you are “afraid” of programming/scripting/mathematics/goldfish /… there really is no reason for that. You just need to inform yourself better and “get over it” or “just do it”. So to help inform you there are plenty of resources out there, courses, video tutorials and books. Here is a list of some of the books that have helped me along the way of becoming a better TD: Technical Director books on Amazon

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