Alembic and material assignment

[Magnus Pettersson]

Hi guys!

Im trying figure out the best way of doing material assignments with the new Alembic delay load primitive and are wondering what you guys use for techniques?

To get material assignment over from Maya, whats the easiest way?

Exporting geo with a shop_materialpath attribute and "hardcoded path" is not working so well since without any material assignment in houdini the shaders wont get written out in the ifd and the render wont have those shaders assigned then. And i cant seem to be able to override the attribute in houdini (see attached file).

Are you writing out a separate "material assignment" file and read that in with a script in houdini to do assignment or something else cleaver?

cheers

Magnus

alembic_materialassignment.zip

[symek]

Related discussion with SESI: http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=28398

[Magnus Pettersson]

From the thread:

"Mantra/SOHO know how to bind materials to Houdini primitives. So, the easiest work-flow would be to use Alembic delayed load primitives and assign the materials to them as Houdini attributes."

I guess the best way now is to write out my own material assignment file from maya at export of the alembic file and then hava a script in houdini that builds up the material assignment with a material node (or just adding shop_materialpath attr in houdini with correct assignment)?

I havnt done any soho hooks before so i think it would take much longer time for me to read in lets say a "material" string on the alembic geo and at rendertime hook it up with a material in houdini. Does anyone have an easy to learn example of this?