Houdini Isn’t Scary - Part 4: Lights Camera Icing

Welcome back to Houdini Isn’t Scary - Part 4: Lights, Camera, Icing. In this tutorial, we are going over the setting up of a render. ’Rendering’ is the process of taking our objects and creating an output. That output in this case is an image. When we render in Houdini, we are basically taking a picture of the objects in our scene (the donut, icing and sprinkles). Much like in real life, you cannot take a picture unless you have a camera and your camera is useless unless there is light. In Houdini we create lights and a camera. However, something else that comes into play is the way that the actual objects interact with light. Objects are gold, pink, black, white, rough, glossy, metallic, see-through etc... We need to do this in Houdini as well. For this, we create materials. These materials control the way our objects look. We control all of the needed settings for our materials by using a shader. A shader is a system that controls how light shades an object. In Houdini, we generally use the Principled S