Hi all

I'm fairly new to Houdini coming from Modo.

I have some models that I have used in Modo that I now want to use in Houdini. I have them in OBJ and FBX format. I thought that the FBX would be ideal as the models have textures and materials and is UV mapped. But for the life of me I cant figure out how to get the textures and materials onto the model which I have successfully imported.

Im using the Apprentice version currently.

Please help.

Regards

Wozy

When you import FBX you have the option to import Materials. However, all this does it make some old school materials that are not really useful for anything other than viewport colorization. But it does assign them to each mesh inside the FBX which is useful. It also makes a SHOP network called materials.

There is really no getting around this step, you have to recreate the materials. But having the SHOP net populated with all the materials required is useful. I often just drag in a single Manta Shader into the SHOP network and then copy and paste as many as materials in the existing network as needed. Then I go through and name the mantra nodes exactly like the existing FBX materials except I prefix them with m_. So if I have materials like skin, hair, eyes etc… I name my Mantra equivalents to m_skin, m_hair, m_eyes. Then you just visit each mesh node's material field and type in revise the name with your material prefix.

If you have diffuse and specular maps, you can assign them in the Mantra version of your materials. The UVs should be detected and you can issue a Mantra PBR render.

If you receive a new version of the FBX all you have to do is copy your existing materials SHOP network to the clipboard, throw away the entire FBX subnet, re-import your revised FBX then delete the imported materials SHOP network and paste in your fixed up one. I do this quite often, it works. You still have to revise the material names on each newly imported mesh but that does not take to long.

Thanks very much for the info. I'll give it a try.

Can the materials be saved as .hda? So if I import another FBX with the same UVs/surface names, I can just use the .hda instead of manually assigning materials?

Thanks.