Material override

[ajz]

Is it possible to override all materials present in the scene when rendering with selected mantra ROPs? I'm setting up scene lighting ATM, but for the sake of shorter render times, I'd like to do my test renders with some simple, non-textured material.

In Maya I could just create a render layer with material override. What is the Houdini way?

[Guest mantragora]

Takes or Variable that switches materials. I think those are tho most obvious paths.

Takes tutorial => http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=876&Itemid=254

Edited April 26, 2015 by mantragora

[ajz]

I quietly hoped that there's some easier solution. I'm familiar with takes, but I also assign materials on SOP level. So, unless I'm mistaken, to override all materials in the scene, I'd have to dive into each ObjNode of my candidate objects to make appropriate modifications to their material operators. For each take...

I guess for my current scene I can do this, but this will be a helluva tedious process.

Edited April 26, 2015 by ajz

[Guest tar]

Material style sheets may be what you're lookling for?

 

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini14.0/shade/stylesheets#idm47005286809440

[Guest mantragora]

I guess for my current scene I can do this, but this will be a helluva tedious process.

 

You know, make some presets for the future. There are many possibilities. I think I would heavily modify MaterialSOP to support my type of work.

[ajz]

Thanks for the tips. I'll look into those stylesheets, but it appears that they require some knowledge of VEX and CVEX and I still didn't have time to explore them thoroughly.

I think for now I'll just mash up a simple script that will traverse through the obj tree and replace shop_materialpath[k] (of each material SOP it comes accross) with links to some predefined material. This should work, unless there are no Python routines dedicated to takes (include/exclude from take).

Edited April 27, 2015 by ajz