htoa: No shadows in render

[Anonymous]

Houdini: 18.0.348

HtoA: 4.4.2

Arnold: 5.4.0.2

I've just download htoa for the first time and tried to get it running in Houdini. I have a simple scene of a cube, a grid, camera, and an arnold spot light. All of them have arnold properties attached. In the Out context I have an Arnold ROP. Clicking "Render" in the render view with the Arnold ROP and camera selected, I get a gross result where the light appears to be affecting the render but there are no shadows. What's going on?

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

you have to assign material for your object

[Anonymous]

Why would applying materials enable shadows? (It works now, thank you)

[Stephen.Blair]

The default shader is the Utility shader, which doesn't use lights. So no shadows.

[Anonymous]

I find this to be quite bizarre, especially coming from c4dtoa where you can get lights and shadows in a scene of objects with absolutely no textures at all.