Octane Houdini's material nodes have a few different types of input/outputs pins, which can be a source of confusion, as they for the most part ARE NOT CROSS COMPATIBLE. (For example you cannot plug a “color” type pin into a “material” pin, or a “int” pin into a “color” pin. - We will go more into detail further along in this article).
You can recognize the type of pin you are dealing with by its color, or by hovering over the pin
Some of the pin types you will find are:
The “color” type pin.
These are the most flexible pins as they can vary across your material and accept all kinds of inputs including color, textures, noises, attributes etc.
This is where many users get confused. Octane uses Houdini’s different default pins so sometimes the naming can be a bit confusing. We are planning to improve this in the future!
There are quite a few nodes in Octane that have these “Int” or “Float” input. And understandably many users may want to connect “color” type nodes to these inputs (WARNING - THIS DOES NOT WORK).
For example:
Driving a texture switch index input - an “int” type input - with a noise, or attribute to switch between textures on a material:
Using a texture to modulate the translation or rotation of a 2d transform to distort or offset a texture in certain areas of a material):
