I've been searching for a way to resolve this for quite a while now and I'm hoping someone can point me in the right direction.

I'm generating some buildings from footprint shapes and then I'm adding pre-made meshes to various points on the structure such as doors/windows etc. I have some python code that looks at all the fbx models in a folder and randomly chooses which to use for the given building. All that is working fine and I'm able to successfully import the geometry for these FBX files. The problem is I'm not getting the embedded textures when using this method. The textures work fine if I import the model manually through file>import so I know the textures/model are setup correctly.

I have seen some mention of shop_materialpath attributes which my imported models do have and those correspond with the material originally created in 3ds max. What I don't know how to do is get at the textures, if I could get the texture path through python somehow that would be fine, I just don't know how I get that path name .fbm/textureName or whatever from the model. I'm also not real clear on how to create new materials programmatically to go with the imported models.

I'm not super deep into all the houdini lingo and vex stuff, most everything I've been working on has been using a handful of geometry nodes and custom python nodes so don't be afraid to spell it out for me. Any help is appreciated. Thank you.

FBX really need to be used with the File->Import FBX tool, or the python equivalent. The file sop only reads the geometry.

It might be possible in your case to use the python interface to the fbx import module to bring in just the materials, and still use file sops for the geometry. I'm not sure what precautions you'll have to take for material name conflicts though.