When I rename a UV map in Houdini, I have to go through the scene and rename these UV’s manually wherever they are used. I even have to manually rename them in every SOP downstream the network.

I was amazed this is still the case in H 21.

In every 3d app I ever used this is handled automatically as one would expect, so very strange this is still handled so poorly. Especially for a procedural App like Houdini, because one of the main advantages of a procedural approach is that adjustments are handled automatically downstream, right ?

How do people handle this in complex scenes with lots of UV adjustment SOPs and materials ?

Maybe your issues stem from your specific workflow, which is likely not common in Houdini


You rarely expect attribute name changes to automatically alter all possible downstream branches as those changes may be very ambiguous and dangerous, likely not intended

You have plenty of options but it comes down to how you organize your scene and workflow

You can always rename your uva at the end after all the adjustments or at any point in the flow where such change is required
Or you can expression link the uv name on all your adjustments if you anticipate plugging in geos with different uv names
Or you can make subnet or hda out of those where name is linked to top level UI
...

Its difficult to know your usecase, but I'd definitely not expect materials to change which uvs they are using just because one of the objects they may be assigned to at some point in one of the nodegraph branches has the uv renamed at some point, especially since attribute renaming is likely done procedurally by a node during the flow and not as a one time rigid change to the scene

Maybe you can give an example of which apps you were using and what is the exact workflow you expect? Since I highly doubt there is software that would mess with which uvmap a material is using just to cater to uv name change on one of the objects its assigned to and therefore break all other objects look that still use previous uv name

Thanks for the pointers.

I'm really surprised this is considered a good thing in Houdini, how could it be a bad thing when everything keeps working after a an upstream adjustment ??

But it's a fairly basic scene with several UVmaps for many Objects. And to remember what UV is used for what texture and where, and to keep things clean I rename them when they are created, so they will be easier to find down the tree.

When I rename them at the end of the tree I have to check what UV is renamed to what in case I need to adjust them.

But I just figured that the "attribute rename" SOP has a toggle to at least rename the UV's downstream. But even when I rename them with "attribute rename" SOP or at the end of the node tree, I'd have to manually rename then in every single material texture ?