Hello,

I am setting up various shaders (Arnold for Houdini in Houdini 16) for a big asset which consists of many pieces. All those shaders will use the same diff/bump/etc. maps. Is there a way to reference those texture files rather than having to set them up for every single shader?

If using mantra, I found that this is possible by setting up your Mantra shaders in the “mat” context and plugging in the same file node into the shaders. This doesn't seem possible with Arnold as arnold shaders need to live within an Arnold Shader Network in order to find them when browsing for a material to assign. Having Arnold shaders simply sit at the “mat” level does not work.

Thank you very much,

Johannes

Several ways how to do this.

there is one:
create one shader (shader1) and load textures you want, then copy paste that shader (shader2). Go back to shader1, select image node and right click on file textbox - copy, then go to shader2, imagenode, and do right click, paste as reference. Do it for all image nodes. When you are done and need more shaders, always copy the shader2, it will copy all those references

Small scene
also you should make familiar with Parameter Spreadsheet panel.


i also recommend to have Dependency link enabled, as that will let you know about dependencies

Dependency enabled