jsmack
Geometry isn't always authored in a way to makes the assignments by hierarchy convenient.
Thank you.
Im doing some reading of USD at tokeru, that might give me some more answers.
But in a mean time. How would you shade and assign materials in the following scenario?
You have 150 materials, you have asset with 20.000 pieces. There is no usable hierarchy for shading and no usable names on the pieces.
I have created whole workflow in SOPs to make this possible to work with, now im trying to do similar in LOPs.
My problem is that if you will have one materialAssign node, where you assign all pieces by selecting them in viewport, next time you asked to change pieceA from materialA to materialB, you have to go and find the materialA tab (with 150tabs, its very hard), remove it from materialA, then find materialB tab and add it to materialB.
What i have instead in SOP is “group”node that allows only unique assignments, so one object can live only in one group. once i assign that piece to another group it gets automatically removed from previous group. User creates 150groups, that later on correspond to creating 150 materials, that are assigned based on the group name. Basically replicating shadingGroups from maya or XSI groups logic.
Option with USD might be to “recreate” hierarchy based on materials and then be assigning materials based on that hierarchy. That sound reasonable, but im little bit of worried about “killing” the original hierarchy. As in some cases it might be actually good and can be used for other things down the road.