Hello!

I know that there's work happening on this new vulkan viewport, but I have been playing with switching between obj and lops more frequently, trying to pick and choose to use the best of both worlds.

the TLDR is that I am unable to get materialX shaders to show up in obj context at all. I would really like this to be addressed because it makes it a lot easier to work with the obj level preview, and im liking assigning shaders in obj (which ive sort of reverted back to after doing it the proper lops way for a year plus) and then bringing them into obj with the scene import. it works great, but I just dont get as nice of a representation in the viewport as i'd like in obj since it doesnt pick up anything from the matx shaders.


here's the longer version:

working fully in solaris is still a huge pain due to the translation from sops to usd that can be a bit laggy. obj is still wayyyy more responsive. so i really like to stick with obj for animation / everything but lighting and rendering and lookdev, and then come into solaris. this works fairly well. it would be great if the sop import was more efficient, but i don't really mind jumping between the two although it is slightly clunky ux wise. also things like setting up camera rigs with nulls and stuff is just way way easier in obj.

i'm finding though also that applying materials in solaris can be a bit of a pain. the mat library can get really slow and lag bewteen putting down different nodes. i'm often having to switch to manual mode just to drop down a bunch of nodes and hook things up and then switch back. it doesn't feel super great. i realized that obj doesn't actually have this issue at all. so recently i've been using more of the scene import vs the sop importer, and it's made my workflow faster and also fixed this material issue. this does seem to me like something that should be looked at on the solaris side though.



i was told that this was fixed, but went to test it in the latest daily build and couldn't get materialx shaders to show up in obj. i'm doing the normal workflow of matnet, create shader, material sop, assign that shader to object. when i do that with the karmamaterialbuilder library i'm just not seeing anything in the viewport shader wise. literally just getting a representation of the base color would be huge, it really doesn't need to be fancy, just something to help with working with animation and previz in obj so that i dont have to have a DIFFERENT shader like principled that displays in obj sops and then change it to a matx shader at the end which is obviously a very clunky way to work. get matx working in the obj gl viewport (and vulkan of course) and i will be sooo happy.

ChristopherRutledge
karmamaterialbuilder

I thought this one doesn't display in GL, it's for Karma only. The USD MaterialX Builder is for pure MaterialX and should display in GL and Karma. I don't know anything about using MaterialX materials in /obj though, I didn't think that was supported at all.

MaterialX should work in /obj, though there is the caveat that all VOP nodes in the network must be Mtlx-prefixed. There was also a bug fixed the other day where it wouldn't recognize the terminal Surface Material as a valid node (if you wired a Mtlx Standard Shader into it), fixed in 20.0.583.

Viewer MaterialX is definitely much less tested in /obj than LOPs (everyone uses LOPs for it, it seems). If you find issues, please submit them. Most MaterialX bugs are fairly trivial to fix.

malexander
MaterialX should work in /obj, though there is the caveat that all VOP nodes in the network must be Mtlx-prefixed.

what does this mean exactly?

ive never been able to get this working so maybe this is something im doing wrong? but regardless its really not obvious what my issue might be.

ive made a video of my issue and will submit as a bug report and DM to you.