Duplicate shader/textures in MAYA - how to remove

[honzal]

HI folks,
I would like to ask all the veterans how you deal with duplicated shaders (textures) in a scene ?
An example: in my scene I have 5 same charactes with all the same shaders/textures ... it exists in the scene as 5 copy of the same shader network and its textures ... is there any simple way how to consolidate it to ONE shader (or at least to have linked same textures to 5 different shaders ?)
My goal is is to lower RAM comsuption while render. Any other tricks will be appreaciate it as well thx

I appologize if it is somewhere hidden as "one click solution" and I don't think it it is the one in HyperShade - Edit/Delete Duplicated Shader networks

THANKS in advance

Jan

[bigbossfr]

Hi,
You can use "user attribute".

[Morbid Angel]

well vray will not load the same textures 5 times, so i dont think that will help. what you can do though is write some small script to assign the same shader to all 5 characters, so removing the need to have 5 identical networks. for the mem usage, if its going above your ram limit you can make your textures into tiled exrs, and control mem usage that way.

[vlado]

An example: in my scene I have 5 same charactes with all the same shaders/textures ... it exists in the scene as 5 copy of the same shader network and its textures ... is there any simple way how to consolidate it to ONE shader (or at least to have linked same textures to 5 different shaders ?) My goal is is to lower RAM comsuption while render. Any other tricks will be appreaciate it as well

I'm not sure that removing the duplicates will help much; as Dmitry pointed out, V-Ray will not load a bitmap multiple times, and the other textures don't take a lot of RAM. Beyond that, using tiled OpenEXR textures might help to reduce memory usage.

Best regards,
Vlado

[honzal]

thx for the info guys !

Jan