【Basics – 着色基础知识 – Houdini帮助文档中文版】
Overview
Materials control the overall look of objects. A material can encompass surface color shading, displacement/bump shading, and volume shading. A material can also generate geometry at render time and apply render properties to the object it is assigned to.
— 材质控制物体的整体外观。一个材质包括表面颜色,置换/凹凸,体积着色等控制。材质也可以用于在渲染时生成几何体，并且运用渲染属性到指定的几何体上。
Shaders for Houdini’s mantra renderer are defined in the VEX shading language. It is possible to write VEX code directly using a text editor, but you will probably prefer to create shaders using VOPs. VOPs are nodes representing shading operations which you can wire together in the network editor to create a shading network.
—-Houdini Mantra渲染器的材质是由VEX材质语言定义的。可以之间使用一个文本编辑器书写VEX代码，但你可能更愿意使用VOPs来创建操作。VOPs是一些材质操作类节点，你可以在网络编辑器中连接它们来创建一个材质网络。
Tip
Materials usually apply to entire objects, however you can use theMaterial SOP to assign materials to individual primitives (i.e. polygon faces).
—材质通常会运用到整个物体上，但是，你可以使用Material SOP来指定材质到Primitive对象上。
Materials in Houdini 11 —— Houdini11中的材质
Prior to Houdini 11, Materials were subnetworks that contained shaders (SHOPs). As of Houdini 11, Materials are now shaders (SHOPs) which can have multiple output VOPs inside to define different types of shading (color, displacement, etc.). This eliminates a layer of complexity and allows you to easily share code between the different shading types since they are in the same network.
在Houdini11之前,材质是包含着色器的子网络容器。Houdini11中，材质是着色器，在内部有多VOP输出，定义着不同的着色器（如颜色，置换等）。 这消除复杂的层控制，可以让你轻松的字不同着色类型间共享代码，因为它们都是处于同一网络中。
Assigning materials from the gallery——从库中指定材质
Houdini comes with a wide array of premade materials in the material gallery. The material palette lets you assign and customize materials from the gallery. The material palette pane is in the default pane layout in the bottom right pane, as a tab alongside the network editor.
–Houdini在材质库中附带了一个广泛的预置好的材质。材质面板可以让你在库中指定和自定义材质。材质面板是默认在面板布局右下方的窗口面板中，处于网络编辑器的旁边。
How to use the material palette —如何使用材质面板
Managing materials –管理材质
Creating new materials–创建一个新的材质
See Working with VOPs for how to build a new material.
–查看使用VOP来创建一个新的材质。
