workflow for overriding material per take

[AdrianLazar]

Hi guys,

I'm new to Houdini so I was wondering what's the workflow when you need to override materials in a take.

The only way I know is to manually change the material for every object but that's not very fast and I'm sure that there's a more elegant solution.

I'm coming from XSI and there when you create a new render pass you have a default group that includes all the objects from the scene. Now let's say that you want to change the shader for half of them. You select the objects, create a new group (called partition there) and you assign the material to that group. All the object that are included in the group will inherit that material for that render pass. You can add other object to the group and they will as well use the group shader. It's quite flexible and it's fast.

I know that I have to adapt to Houdini workflow but I'm hoping to find a similar solution using object groups created for each take.

I tried to use bundles but I'm unable to figure out how to use them to override the material for all the objects that are included and also how to create a bundle only for that take.

Thanks,

Adrian

[lukeiamyourfather]

Since this is Houdini we're talking about there's probably a lot of ways to do it. One way would be to setup a switch in a SHOP network and set the switch based on the takes. So if you have say three materials then create a "Output Shaders" node and plug the switch into that. Then plug all your materials into the switch and assign the "Output Shaders" node (probably suboutput1 is the node name) as the material on the objects.

Another way would be to create multiple objects at the root level and assign different materials to each. Then create output drivers for the different material groups or however else you want to arrange it. If you specify the objects with the "Force Objects" parameter then they will render even if their visibility is disabled in the viewport. All of them can be rendered in sequence or parallel if you chain them together or select all and hit render.

Or yet another way would be to combine all of the materials into one and put their information into extra image channels instead of the default RGB output. So you get one image with however many channels you want and then they can be split up at the compositing level. Hopefully that helps, or if not then I'm sure others will have additional methods.