Hello everyone.

I am working on an HDA to optimize (polyreduce, bake details, etc) FBX models in unity, with the option to export a new FBX at the end.
Anyway, my current problem is the materials. Specifically, from the imported FBX I get a shop_materialpath attribute with the name of the 3dsmax material, and nothing else.
What I need, both for the HDA and the FBX export option, is a (procedural, as this is for an HDA) way to take that shop_materialpath attribute, create and assign to it some placeholder materials with names matching the original ones, just so the material info will show up at the end, outside of Houdini.
Now, I have been searching for a way to do this using nodes, and came up empty, but I believe this would be solved using either vex (maybe even vops?) or python, both of which I want to learn, but will not be able to within the deadline for this project.
Any help would be greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance