Packed Alembics not assigning materials anymore

[bender83]

I have a scene I upgraded from Houdini 17.5/vray 4.5 to Houdini 18/vray 5 bit by bit with mostly success - however some parts of my scene stopped working, I discovered the changed behaviors and adjusted - one issue Im having however is that it seems like perhaps the way shop_materialpath is read from packed alembics has changed as a bunch of chracters I have now render white that didnt in the previous version. Can anyone point me to a rundown of how I should be doing material assignments (currently writing the shop_material attribute to disk on a packed disk sequence and that WAS working), unsure what has changed or how I should be reading alembics back through.

Cheers
Ben

edit: I am forcing materials * also.

[bender83]

Yeh it seems that forced materials is having no effect.

I have mesh -> material node (shop_materialpath) -> render to alembic -> Alembic SOP set to packed geo -> render, forcing all materials -> No materials visible.

https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...le-error/page2
Found this - promoted my materials up to top /mat level and that worked -but - I can't afford to do that across my massive scene - not to mention the visual mess of it all.

Im on VRay for Houdini 11249 VRay Core 5.00.50 - has this been fixed since? Or is this something else?

[bender83]

I figured this out - I was using shading networks reconstructed from Maya in Houdini - they all contained the VRayNodeMtlSingleBRDF inside the material builder - this would prevent the materials on the packed objects from rendering - as soon as I got rid of that node, my shaders returned.

[david.anastacio]

bender83, thanks for posting the solution, could be handy in the future.

[chakarov]

Hello bender83 , can you share a simple scene, so I can check it my side ?

[bender83]

I will send via pipeline from Zoic Studios as soon as I get the chance!