If you work with Side Effects Houdini, you know that Custom Attributes are an important part of you daily workflow. Also useful is having attributes affect shaders in the scene. If you are using Octane render within Houdini, this is not natively possible at the moment.

how you can use custom attributes in Octane in Houdini.

Rohan Dalvi demonstrates a bit of a workaround for using Houdini custom attributes with Octane Render. The thing is, Octane can’t read Houdini attributes, however it can read one attribute… UV Maps. From Houdini’s standpoint, UV’s are simply attributes. Knowing this you can basically take any attribute and pass it through the shader’s UV channel.

Thankfully, Octane can have up to 3 UV Layers, so you can use one channel for UV’s and the other two, to transfer attributes.