Casey Benn

So I am trying to use the Material Linker materials as a starter for building up the materials I want to use in the project.

My plan was to copy materials I like for starting with in Material Linker and then using "edit material" to dive into the materials which use a Mtlx Standard Surface.

Then I would copy/paste that shader with its material settings and inputs into the Material Library I was building, in this instance for auto materials... exterior/interior. Then tweak there, say with custom tire logos, brand logos, button icons etc.

The first few materials came over ok, but many of them show up black once in the Material Library.

I assume this is because the "Subnetwork" that is attached to the inputs of the Mtlx Standard Surface in each shader that comes from the Material Linker is localized somehow? That I would need to specify those Subnetworks that I want it not to grab data from the Material Linker anymore?

Just trying to figure out why the shaders don't seem to copy/paste into the Material Library straight away.

Thanks for any info.

Ok, I finally was able to get this to work and thought I would leave it here since I didn't get any responses.. in case the other four people on Earth that will work this way some day may look for it.

I am not exactly sure why it works but I fiddled around with different ideas about attaching information to the data before it ended up in the Cache.

Previously I was doing the (Convert) node from "All to Polygon Soup" after the Sim Cache.

I also was just using the default Outside/Inside/Chipping etc groups that the RBD Material Fracture creates.
Instead this time I applied materials Outside and Inside using those predefined groups to see if they would help Maya see information about the faces assigned after the UV process.

Somehow this ends up with a successful Alembic bake that doesn't crash Maya on import AND... with UVs.

Here is the info on the convert node... I see the UV 3flt.. isn't that my UV info?