VOPS is a very handy tool within Houdini which allows you to create a custom Vex or even RSL shader using nodes which represent peices of VEX or RSL code which preform standard functions often needed in writing a shader. For those of you that have worked with SLIM, VOPS is very similiar. However, Sooner or later you are going to want to create a custom VOP node. These nodes can be either specific mathematical functions or full Vex shaders. Creating your own VOPS node is quite simple. Use vcc -m to compile your code into an .otl file. Load the created .OTL into Houdini and the compiled code will be available as a VOP node.