I have a bunch of materials that I have successfully brought into solaris from various sources using a file node set to sublayer. They render on a shader ball just fine. I have something like 200 materials in total though, so I need to organize them.

Two questions:

First off, as best as I can tell the only node that allows me to restructure the node graph is the "Restructure Scene Graph" node. I am able to move things around and rename them with this, which is great, but I can only do one single operation at a time. So let's say I want to just move and rename each of the above 200 materials, then that's 400 nodes in sequence to do something fairly basic. So how am I supposed to do something like this? Script it all out in Python?

And that brings me to the second issue. I imported 160ish materials from one source, and 40ish materials from another source. First source materials have all of the shaders and node graphs under the material, which is how I want it because it lends itself to easily organizing these materials.

But the second source materials are all structured like this so that the various components are in separate folders and they reference each other:

Materials
--MaterialA
--MaterialB
--MaterialC
NodeGraphs
--MaterialA
--MaterialB
--MaterialC
Shaders
--ShaderA
--ShaderB

So now I have two separate organizational schemes, and if I write a python script to move around the materials and move the components all under one single material, then it breaks the connections. And then when I dig into the metadata tab on each material to try and figure out where the references are happening and fix them, it's just very unclear what's going on in there much less how to manipulate it with a script.


Seriously. What's going on here. I just want to apply some materials to some geometry and organize and rename things just like how I can with every other software in the world. Why do I need to jump through so many hoops to do something so basic. This exact same thing is an effortless beginner mode task in every single other 3D software including even Houdini itself as long as you avoid the unnecessary complexities of Solaris. I've encountered everything from missing basic features (the only node that can modify the scene graph structure can only do one single operation at a time) to completely broken functionality (if you save out or copy a .mtlx file from Solaris, it exports to an incorrect xml schema that is incompatible with the official implementation, so you literally can't load the same file you just exported back into Solaris).

Am I just fundamentally missing something here, or is it really this challenging?

How do people get anything done here?