I've been playing a bit with the RedShift trial. I took one of my scenes, added some RS lights, and created a handful of RS SHOP networks to make some textures. I then went through all of my Material nodes and changed them to these new materials. I've now gotten it looking like what I'd like.

However, now everything in the viewport is gray, and trying to render with Mantra shows the same gray objects.

My question, is there a way of making this kind of setup work, where the materials would be selected based on the renderer being used? One thought I had was to name the materials consistently and try to wrangle the shop_materialpath to possibly change the material. I'd have to dig a bit to figure out how to do this.

Any other ideas on how this is typically handled? My primary goal is to make the viewer show textures, but it'd be nice to be able to use both RedShift and Mantra in the same scene.

There is a discussion about this in the Redshift forums in the General section, you might need to dig a bit in there to find it but it's there. It's primarily a way to use the OpenGL shaders for the viewport so that you're not staring at grey objects while using Redshift.

But to answer your question, I don't think there is a way to use both Redshift and Mantra in the same scene without having to switch material assignments back and forth between the two. I suppose you could use different Takes, but you'd still need to go back and forth and re-assign materials.


Also, somewhat related, SHOP network has been deprecated, you should create your materials in the MAT context.

The collect VOP is supposed to facilitate this, although it's up to the renderers to support this functionality.

jsmack
The collect VOP is supposed to facilitate this, although it's up to the renderers to support this functionality.

The only way I've been able to get any kind of shader to work with RedShift is to use its “RS Material Builder” which seems to be a Vex Builder network, but it only allows the RedShift nodes in it. Maybe the RedShift plugin isn't quite integrated enough to be able to combine shaders like this.

Any other ideas on how this is typically handled? My primary goal is to make the viewer show textures, but it'd be nice to be able to use both RedShift and Mantra in the same scene.


You can use multiple renderers within in same scene in Houd. However, you will need to setup shader & light rig for each renderer. Redshift, as far as I know (or think I know), cannot use Mantra shaders and Mantra lighting. So you will need to match light settings with both renderers. Same for shaders. You could try using SWITCH SOPs to toggle between Material SOP assigning Mantra shaders and second Material SOP assigning RS materials. Create two takes. In first take the switches point to Mantra shade&light. Take2 points to Redshift.

Just wondering…haven't used both Redshift and Mantra…so don't know completely what's all involved.

But couldn't a set up using python scripts and some elements of the new PDG be a way?