Asking for some help here.

In Autodesk Maya, there is a bonus tool, that allows you to create a material for each object selected, you can import an .obj or .fbx that has multiple objects or pieces and separate the mesh into separate geometry, then select them all and add a material for each object. It's very useful when you export to .obj or .fbx for use with Unity, UE5, Element 3d, Helium etc to create an assortment of animated effects.

I am trying to create a for each loop that will assign a readable "basic material" for each piece in either .obj or .fbx

it's very unclear to me, from what I can search online how to achieve this in Houdini 19.5.

Can anyone here help me to understand and create a system that will create a material for each piece/object?

the objective is that when I export the model .obj or .fbx, and I import it into any of the above, it reads a material for each object/piece.

this took me a while to get right, however I didn't really find a straight forward answer to this in my search so I am updating this post and the other only one I have seen with this answer.


01) use an attribute wrangle to create an id attribute for each piece set to primitives



02) then use attribute create - set the name to shop_materialpath - set the class to primitive - set the type to string - in the string identifier use material.$ID


this will export your geometry with materials for each piece that can be read by unity, UE5, element 3d and so on. I hope helps answer this question for others in the future more clearly.