VEX VOP SHOPs!! RnD for a personal project..

Well I have been pretty occupied by a personal project I have decided to take up in Houdini from start to finish. Its also a quite daunting task for now.

I have few tricks up my sleeve for some aspects of this....HOWEVER I definitely DO need to collect lots more!

So I set out on a RnD expeditition....and I do, now, FULLY REALISE enormity of the task....(better now than later..hahaha)

Yet I have decided to go ahead with it irrespective of whatever comes flying at me....

Not only I need to try and create some shaders that I'll be using for Environment and stuff....but also try and GET the lighting right..And in all honesty I say I have to improve my senses when it comes to Lighting.

Here's a test render of a cracked surface using a relatively low Poly Grid and my own Displacement Shader. It was only after I rendered this, that I realised that its pretty low on contrast and is not pretty crisp.

I tried PBR in Mantra, Global Illumination as well as some Ambient Occlusion..

& faced an issue with PBR though..

1) PBR did not really work for me because (I guess) it did not like my shaders :D

So I did try to search through the Hel dodcumentation but I need a way to incorporate PBR in

my shader for it to respond to it..

PBR is fundamentally a render engine which uses correct light simulations..So probably it will need some attributes to initiate things..

This certainly has been a challenging day...I hope get things right..and I'm running short on time!

EDIT: Though I mentioned the issue I faced with PBR (because of using my own shaders), It slipped my mind to also document its solution. I simply had to output my Lighting model's 'f' output to the Output's 'F' input....these are BSDF inputs which are needed for any ineraction with PBR (IMHO)..

thanks @danBode (at odforce) :)