hi,

I just started with houdini engine for maya, but I'm a bit stuck as I don't find some maya-specific docs (what features are supported, ..)

I'm creating an asset in houdini, which has 2 to 3 materials assigned to different faces of the same geo. now I'd like to bring this over to maya.

I don't need the specific material valued (yet), but would like maya to create e.g. simple lamberts or phongs with the right name and actually assign them to the correct faces.

if there's a simple example how to do this, I'd be super happy.

please let me know.

thanks!

I think the easiest way is to not even bother with Houdini Engine. Just save your file as an Alembic, .abc file and then import it into Maya.

hmm. ok.

thanks for the input!

The Maya plugin can't output materials that are used per-face yet. However, it is possible to output material assignment information to use a Maya material that already exists in the Maya scene. This is done through manipulating the “maya_shading_group” primitive attribute. When the output geometry contains this attribute, the plugin will assign Maya material that already exists in the Maya scene to the corresponding faces. See the attached scene file for an example.

The original intent of this attribute is to save the per-face material assignment of an input geometry, and restore it when the geometry is outputted into Maya again. However, it can be used (abused?) to output material assignments.

I think the easiest way is to not even bother with Houdini Engine.

I think this depends on the work environment. Where I'm now I get a lot of use cases for Engine as it allows non-Houdini users to access procedural solutions.