Hi,

I'm trying to get an object with two materials (one surface shader, one displacement shader) to render using the delayed load procedural pipeline.

I've tried rendering an ifd via the mantra archive rop, I've tried both bundling the materials in with the geo and writing them out separately. However, when I source the ifd in my delayed load shader I get the geo with no materials assigned.

I'm probably missing something within the mantra archive workflow. Any tips?

if the geometry has materials already assigned a shop_materialpath
then Houdini doesn't know about that since it doesn't read the geometry if it's delay loaded

in that case just make sure that you have materials in your scene with the same paths as declared in geo and set Mantra/Rendering/Render/Declare Materials to Save All SHOPs
in that case houdini will include all materials in ifd whether they are used or seemingly not and your geo will be able to find them
this works nicely with packed disk workflow

for older Delayed Load Shader workflow, the ifd archive should work though

Thanks Tomas,

That helped. I was able to bake one shader into the ifd. When I bake two, it grabs the first shop_materialpath and that's all I get. This is still very useful and solves my problem, with one shader baked into the ifd I was able to layer an additional shader onto the delayed load when rendering.

Thanks again!

-Daniel