a “Side Effect” (pun intended) of my “DAZ to Houdini” (or general “FBX-RIG-converting-loader”) has been a material-setup routine.
I created an additional HDA that sets up a material network for Mantra and/or Redshift, populating material nodes and setting values.
While the “Lab-OBJ-Loader” doesn't work for me on most of my test OBJ files (materials don't get created correctly and/or paths are not adjusted), this one tries to be smart and allows for “material collection” in a separate folder or “rewrite path” where desired.
If the MTL file provides shader information like specularity/opacity, those values are set as well. If those values are not provided in the MTL file, the user can tell the HDA to create dummy nodes (for Redshift) or set up dummy paths for principledshader nodes.
Wrangle-Rewriter and Material-Node are both created so that the user can easily pick what to use, what to change or where to stash out.
Read in an OBJ through a file node, wire the file node out to the HDA.
Specify if “forced” parameters/nodes are created and define whether Mantra or RS materials are set up. Also specify a replacement directory (or not) and whether you want material files to be copied into that directory.
After “RUN” is executed, a complete network structure has been provided.
A Rewrite-Wrangle takes care of adjusting “shop_path” in the geo data, conveniently laid out for adjustment after the fact.
A Material Node takes care of assigning materials to groups, also laid out for manual adjustment, if so desired.
Materials get populated with specular, translucency/opacity and diffuse color information, if those are provided in the MTL file.
Works well with hundreds of paths/materials as well.
Marc