Hi there,
this has probably been discussed before, but I can't find an answer or get it to work in my scene.

I made some caches and load them via instancepath as packed geo (packed disc) in my scene. These instances consist of two streams with "name" and "shop_materialpath" attributes. I used the name so that I have them separated in Solaris.



When I import it in Solaris I have everything I thought I need. The instanced meshes (Xform) and all instances with meshes (flakes and surface) according to my "name" attribute. These have the primvars, including the shop_materialpath (set to a VOP in the material library LOP).


But it only renderns a standard shader and not the assigned one (with shop_materialpath). Do I have to activate the VOP in Solaris (the material libray LOP) somehow or how is this supposed to work? Would it be possible to assign one VOP to all Meshes in my Instances that are called "surface"? I tried a lot of stuff, but nothing seems to work unfortunately.


Any help on this is highly appreciated.





Thanks.



// Edit: oh, the yellow exclamation mark comes from "The layer imported from SOPs has no save path set. The SOP node's layer will be output to a file path generated from its Houdini path." which i will also never understand. When I set an save path these meshes disappear in the rendering but it works if I just leave it as it is. But that's different thing :/

To my knowledge, you can’t seamlessly export SOP to LOP in Houdini. Honestly, this is the most questionable part of Houdini for me in terms of usability friction. The shop_materialpath parameter doesn’t seem to do anything, and I recommend looking into the ‘Bind Material’ section in the SOP Import documentation and the ‘Fill’ section in the Material Library.

Regarding the yellow exclamation mark, that typically indicates issues related to saving in different files. I suggest reading the ‘Layer Save Path’ documentation for SOP Import to understand how to handle this situation. In my case, I ignoring it

Hey,
thanks for the answer. I read all that but I think it's just not clear how it is supposed to work in general. I also did a test scene with assigned materials (without instancing) pointing to the VOB inside the material library LOP. In SOPs it gets the right displayColor from the material, but in the stage context it's not working. Also I thought it would translate shop_materialpath to whatever LOP can read ("usdmaterialpath" ?) as it does with other standard attributes (Cd to displayColor fe).

This really puzzles me. I hope somebody knows how this works.