Hi- beginner here, I've been struggling with what I think is a very basic problem, so maybe someone could help. (I'm using Houdini Core 20.5)

When dealing with crowds in Solaris I can successfully assign materials to my shapelibrary geos located in the agentdefinitions section.

But the next step to make a visually interesting crowd would usually be to add color or texture variations, and of course I can't access the individual agents in the same way because they are considered as instanced proxies.

I'm not the best at understanding usd properties, but from what I've read it should be possible to override materials with primvars.

So after watching a few tutorials I tried using MtlX Geometry Property Value as an input inside my material, but most example I could find were using the "materialvariation" node to color point instances (using the bracket characters syntax) and that's not what I'm looking for.

I don't seem to understand which primitives to target and assign with what. It's giving me headaches. I've read the documentation for every node and watched every video I could find but I'm a bit lost.

Maybe I'm just missing something with the syntax. I also tried putting every instance proxy inside a collection, without success.


I think I don't have the right workflow so outside of my specific technical issues I was wondering if there is another way.
It was so easy to randomize agents, agentlayers, clips, cliptime etc.. isn't there a simple way to randomize colors/hues or texture paths for sop imported crowd agents ?

Thank you and have a great day

I think there are two ways to randomize agent material,color variations or texture wariations

for color variations you can create a random point color for every agent,and then it them in material context with MTLX geometry color node , multiply it with your base color texture

for texture variation you can create a random id attributes with your totle number of variation basecolor texture,and then read it in material context with MTLX geometry property value node, connect all your texture variation to the inputs of switch node, connect the MTLX geometry property value to which parameter