Convenient Material location

[Antosha]

Hello!

I need an advice, where I should place materials (obj/geo1/shop or /shop) in respect of pipeline convenience (Redshift/Arnold used)?

[Neon Junkyard]

Personally, I never use /shop, its annoying to navigate to and on complex projects I like to group my materials in multiple mat networks at the object level .  Arnold/Redshift/Pipelines in general dont care where you put your materials in terms of breaking the render, you can put them in literally any context and it will work as long as the shop_materialpath attribute is maintained.  Generally speaking though, its probably best to only use sop-level material networks in HDAs, standalone assets etc.  Otherwise it makes it extremely difficult to navigate your scene should you hand it off to someone, or come back to it months or years later.  Ultimately personal preference though

[Antosha]

3 hours ago, Neon Junkyard said:

Personally, I never use /shop, its annoying to navigate to and on complex projects I like to group my materials in multiple mat networks at the object level .  Arnold/Redshift/Pipelines in general dont care where you put your materials in terms of breaking the render, you can put them in literally any context and it will work as long as the shop_materialpath attribute is maintained.  Generally speaking though, its probably best to only use sop-level material networks in HDAs, standalone assets etc.  Otherwise it makes it extremely difficult to navigate your scene should you hand it off to someone, or come back to it months or years later.  Ultimately personal preference though

But if you have multiple, not instanced objects, related to one material and you wanted to change some parameters to all of these objects? Navigating is quite rapid with shop pane on second monitor.. Its like hypershade xD

I store my materials in /shop, but in almost all tutorials and houdini videos I noticed that cg artists placing it in geo/shop level.. I think it is not convinient, but also I think I miss something

 

Edited May 4, 2019 by Antosha

[davpe]

this is something you have to decide as an user, what fits your needs better. i think it's great that you have this freedom to put your materials where it suits you. I tend to put materials inside of geo when working on some bespoke asset, as that way material can be easily shared together with the geometry and other data as a single package (as a gallery item for instance). if i work on environments or something where i use generic materials shared between more objects, i tend to put them at root /obj level (or /shop, /mat alternatively), as it's somewhat easier to navigate between them as you pointed out. and with most project i typically end up having both - a few specific assets with its materials embedded at geo level and some other shared materials at root level. for rapid navigation in more complex scenes i'm using Tree View with just material nodes filtered out, so you can see all your materials in "outliner" kind of structure, and you can navigate to them by just clicking on them in the list.