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. 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.

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.

Hello haggi krey !
Did you happen to find a good solution to assign materials to your crowds when bringing them back in Solaris ?
I spent quite some time on it, here is where I am at:

- If you want to deal with large crowd, you have to Create Instance SkelRoots
- If you want simply to apply a material to a whole agent (all the geo) it is easy with Assign Material or Assign Material Variation
- However, if you want to access primitives contained in the agent, it is impossible with these methods because you get the error:
"authoring to an instance proxy is not allowed." UNLESS you use collections to do the material assignements which works in Houdini
- BUT it does not render in Arnold (which I think is a Arnold issue)

Did you find a work around in the end ?
Or do you have leads ?

To me, unpacking agents doesn't do much when it comes to this problem

Thanks again