Hi- beginner here, I've been struggling with what I think is a very basic problem, so maybe someone could help. (I'm using Houdini Core 20.5)
When dealing with crowds in Solaris I can successfully assign materials to my shapelibrary geos located in the agentdefinitions section.
But the next step to make a visually interesting crowd would usually be to add color or texture variations, and of course I can't access the individual agents in the same way because they are considered as instanced proxies.
I'm not the best at understanding usd properties, but from what I've read it should be possible to override materials with primvars.
So after watching a few tutorials I tried using MtlX Geometry Property Value as an input inside my material, but most example I could find were using the "materialvariation" node to color point instances (using the bracket characters syntax) and that's not what I'm looking for.
I don't seem to understand which primitives to target and assign with what. It's giving me headaches. I've read the documentation for every node and watched every video I could find but I'm a bit lost.
Maybe I'm just missing something with the syntax. I also tried putting every instance proxy inside a collection, without success.
I think I don't have the right workflow so outside of my specific technical issues I was wondering if there is another way.
It was so easy to randomize agents, agentlayers, clips, cliptime etc.. isn't there a simple way to randomize colors/hues or texture paths for sop imported crowd agents ?
Thank you and have a great day