glTF from Houdini Demo

A quick demo demonstrating how to export objects with materials to glTF format. Not the most detailed post, but just some quick notes on the steps for exporting glTFs and the methods I have used to achieve useful results.

This process uses a sop level exporter, but there are other methods that are very similar that export through different contexts.

The first step is to append the glTF export sop to your geo. In my case I am just using a simple beveled box.

For the shader you unfortunately can’t use the new COPs workflows, as the exporter will only take Principled BSDFs.

So you will need to go into or place a new Material Network, and create a Principled Shader.

Another issue I ran into was that the exporter did not like image inputs on the shaders. So all textures had to be applied as files textures in the shader.

Another issue is that glTF doesn’t take displacement, so any bump has to be in the form of a normal map.

A solution that solves all of these problems is to build your texture in COPs and then instead of applying it as a material preview you just export each input as a png texture that you can bring into the Principled Shaders

In my case I only needed to generate a Normal Map as I was using the Houdini preset concrete texture.

glTF file viewed in the windows 3D viewer.

The artifacts on the seems come from the quick and dirty UV maps I used. In a serious project this would be avoided.

File outputs from the glTF ROP node.

After this you just need to apply the texture, that can be done by dragging the bsfd node onto the object from the Material Network, or by applying it with a material node.

With this you can export with the rop. If the object is animated make sure to select the frame range, otherwise you can just export at the current frame for static objects.