How to assing shaders to crowd agents in solaris.

[haggi]

Hi, I have some truble to assing shaders to my crowd agents in Solaris. Since I want to export my crowds with material to usd for later rendering in Maya with Arnold, I want to assing materials to crowd agents. While a shader assignment works fine if I import the crowds with the Create SkelRoots option, this seems to work only for a few agents because if I export the scene, the needed ram exceeds quite fast my machines capabilities. So because I want to use it with some more agenst, I hope there is a way to assign materials to crowds imported with the Create Instanced SkelRoots option. As you can see in the attached image, assingment of materials do not work in a way I understand. Or - what would be cool - if I could find a way to only export the geometry and skeleton only for one frame and later layer the animation from a extra layer, but if I understand the docs correctly this is not an option with usdSkel. I'd appreciate any ideas.

[haggi]

Uppsss... I think I found the problem. The main problem site in front ot the keyboard. The sop crowd import lop node already has everything I need. The important point here is that I have to unpack the agents in the sop import. Now evertyhing seems to work fine.

[hannes603]

can you provide a scene for us? i would like to see it !

[Viduttam]

If you take a look at your Scene Graph Tree, you will notice that all the crowd instances are actually based on the Agent Definition prim.
So in a separate node chain in Solaris, sop import your original agent, which should have the agent definition prim. Now set up your material library/assignments etc. to the agent definition prims. and then you can Sublayer (Stronger than Descendents) this at the end of your original node chain. That way all the agents will automatically pick up the shaders and additionally you can connect a vary_material lop node to further customize based on any variants.