Hey there.

Is it possible to get procedural textures and materials to Maya with Houdini Engine? I have a flipping geo which gets some text assigned in COPs. I published the Text input to an asset and loaded it into Maya. But in maya all my linked Materials stay black. Am I missing something? Thank you in advance. The references are all relative of course, and working within Houdini.

Cheers,
Elmar

I solved it by attaching groups instead of materials and transferring them to Maya. There the user can attach his custom material. But that functionality as mentioned above would be nice nonetheless. Thanks anyway, everyone.

I think there might be an issue with detecting whether a material/texture has changed. So the texture isn't updated correctly. If your texture is supposed to change every frame, then you could try to force the update by adding something like +$F-$Fto a numeric parameter. It's a bit silly, but it works. I've attached an example asset.

Even when the material/texture is forced to update every frame, I still noticed there's some update issue in Viewport 2.0 on the Maya side though.

Thanks for the example. First i had to change to SHOPs since the new Material-Contexts shader (with principled shader) wasn´t displayed in Maya. I can change the text now and also see the changes in the viewport, but i still have to reload the asset when i want to insert new text. That workaround with Framenumbers doesn´t work for my setup unfortunately, but in my case the texture does not need to change every frame so this is okay.


Thank you.
Cheers,
Elmar

Yeah, that's the same update issue. The Maya side isn't able to detect when the texture has changed, and need updating. If you change the frame, it should trigger an update on the text without reloading the asset though.

If it's crucial to update it without changing frame, similar to the time, you can add something like +0*chs("../../parm")to fake the dependency…

Yeah, i tried but unfortunately still not working since the whole parm is evaluating to an empty string as soon as I add the expression. I also tried to append an empty string (“”) to the text, but this also does not trigger an update.
Works, but doesnt update in maya
chs(“../../frontText”)+“”

Does not work in Maya or Houdini - evaluates to an empty string:
chs(“../../frontText”)+0*chs(“../../frontText”)

Check out the attached asset. It uses the following:
0.8+0*$F+0*chs("../../parm")It has to be on a numeric parameter on the material node.

It´s working now. Thank you so much, Andrew. I didn´t realise that I had to set the parm to the material node and not the cops-node. Have a nice weekend.

Cheers,
Elmar

Hello,
I noticed that in maya, the hda write a file. And he refreshes her every frame.

I am in the same case, I must read a procedural texture animated from an HDA.
But here the texture is baked in a png file and after read. This image is updated every time.

I'm looking for a more optimized solution without having to write a file.
Inside maya ,I don't know if it's possible to directly read the procedural texture with an output of the hda.

cheers

The plugin must write a file to disk so that the normal Maya file texture node can be utilized. It is not currently possible to circumvent this unfortunately.

I came across this by looking for a related issue. What blows my mind is the setup of the material and the spare parameters on it. How exactly does that work? Via parameter tags and standard parameter names? What am I even looking at? XD
Is there a masterclass or anything that explains how and why it was set up the way it is? Where can I learn about this dark magic?