I'm attempting to process a bunch of .objs coming out of Maya that had material assignments at the face level.

After import, there's a “shop_materialpath” attribute attached to the primitives that corresponds to each shading group. What i'd like to do is create a group for each one of these unique “shop_materialpath” values so that I can easily reconstruct the material assignments in Houdini. Alternatively, I'd want to automate the creation of multiple blast nodes for each unique value for further processing but that seems like it would require python.

I was able to figure out this VEX function that will return all the material values:

s@materials = prim(0,“shop_materialpath”,@primnum);

I assume this is the function I'd need to use to create the actual groups:

setprimgroup(0,“test”,1,“set”);

What i'm not able to figure out is how I would link these together. I assume I would need to somehow loop over the values of the “shop_materialpath” and create groups based on that name but I'm having a hard figuring out how this would actually work.

Any guidance would be much appreciated.

hello,
the partition sop might be of any help?

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/sop/partition.html [www.sidefx.com]

There is another thread with a solution to this topic. I hope this helps. https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/73565/?page=1#post-310947 [www.sidefx.com]