Rendering imported FBX files from TOPs, keeping assigned materials

[grafikzeug]

Hello there!

The task is to go through folders with lots of fbx files (each with several assigned textures and materials) and render out thumbnails of each object. Simple enough.

The problem is that I can't find a way to do this without loosing the texture and material data supplied by the FBX Importer SOP node, so the resulting renderings turn out gray, without textures.

My approach is to start with a filepattern that gets wired into an HDA processor with a Labs FBX Archive Import inside and the relevant parameters exposed:

The FBX Archive Importer neatly connects up all the different materials each of the fbx files has, but this data gets lost when I wire in the ropkarma node afterwards (which makes sense, I guess, as that HDA processor should only output geometry:)

Now my question is: how do I get the correctly assigned texture and material information to the karma renderer? I feel like I'm making an obvious mistake but can't figure out how to do it. The only other solution I came up with is baking all the Maps into a single map and then using those baked maps down the line, but this seems overly complicated, time consuming and I lose texture fidelity in the process.

How do you go about importing and rendering loads of files with loads of (unknown) numbers of assigned textures?

Thankful for anyone pointing me in the right direction.

Cheers!