Hi guys,

We're testing out a workflow from Realillusion Character Creator 4 to Houdini. It seems that a good way to export from CC is USD, so shaders are preserved. The USD export from CC is made for Omniverse, and the shaders are MDL. These are not rendering in Karma - is there a way to support them? I asked about V-Ray too, and there is an update there that does support them, but it would be great if Karma does too.

Thanks!

MDL is Nvidia's extension to USD format, it's not part of the base USD spec. Sidefx has chosen to support the Mtlx extension instead. I don't see them moving to adopt every single material schema that gets created for USD.

Hello,

I face off same situation where commercial 3d models in usd are mdl based for material description.
Evermotion archmodels with usd [evermotion.org]

Does it means the pain to integrate external 3d model library will never ending on houdini side ?
I really hope some move to facilitate the day to day work about this.

I came across the same issue recently with Evermotion MDLs.

Here's a quick script that converts them to USDs:
https://github.com/pixel-ninja/mdl_to_usd [github.com]

Note that it probably won't work on anything other than the Evermotion materials as it's hardcoded to look for that formatting.

Thank you for sharing @pixelninja, I'll look at this for sure.