proxy material workflow

[psanitra]

Currently the material workflow with proxies is not great. There is no easy or fast way to assign material to geometry that was saved to proxy. One have to reconstruct new material, get IDs of geo inside, copy his materials from original networks to new one, link up each material individually.

It takes lot of time, compared to just copy the original Material SOP and connect it. What`s worse is that we loose the link to original materials, which makes switching between live geo and proxy usage problematic, they have different materials now. If I adjust live geo material, i have to copy that to proxy network again etc. It`s just not right.
I recorded a video for those who are not aware of how it works now.

Can we please revise the whole system? So it`s easier and faster for user to use proxies and keep material in sync for both live geo and saved proxy?There for sure are plenty of options on the table.

It would be great if proxy can just accept the original Material SOP when connected to Vray proxy import.

It would be even better if you store materials in vrmesh, like you do in vrscene. Ultimately, in future just unify the workflow remove vrmesh for all V-Ray DCCs, keep just vrscene, and have user decide what he stores inside - if it`s pure geo, or geo+mats, or also lights,cams, render settings etc

thank you

[bdancer]

> There for sure are plenty of options on the table.

Not much actually.
If you could use Alembic instead of vrmesh then you could use this approach https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...-console-error with baking "shop_materialpath" into abc.

> It would be even better if you store materials in vrmesh, like you do in vrscene.

Storing material in vrmesh file will make this file a vrscene file and we already have vrscene file to be a vrscene file...

> Ultimately, in future just unify the workflow remove vrmesh for all V-Ray DCCs, keep just vrscene, and have user decide what he stores inside - if it`s pure geo, or geo+mats, or also lights,cams, render settings etc

I would love this

[psanitra]

I guess i will have to write a python script that will just repeat the manual steps, create network, copy mats and hookup to your Proxy Materials...

Anyways, USD and H18 around the corner, things will get even more interesting with materials and geo