(Resolved) [HOU-3305] Transfer materials from Maya to Houdini

Hi, I was trying to transfer materials from Maya scene to Houdini using vrscene. I was able to unpack vrscene in Houdini and get the shading network but the only thing not transferring is the displacement network. In Maya, I tried both, applying the displacementShader in the ShadingGroup and the v-ray displacement node on the geo itself, still only the displacement shader in missing when unpacking in Houdini. Whereas Displacement works I don’t unpack and render directly from the vrscene. Is this a limitation? Any workarounds? My main goal is to transfer the shading network between DCCs.

Thanks

> Is this a limitation?

Yes.

> Any workarounds?

Currently no.
Since in V-Ray plugin terms displacement is geometry (not material) it’s a bit tricky to import it.

> My main goal is to transfer the shading network between DCCs.

Hope USD will help here at some point.

Thank you for the clarification!

I did try a partial workaround for the displacement shading network. I just plugged the displacementShader node with all it’s upstream math node network to an arbitrary empty attribute (ex- Bump Strength) in the Material, so that it doesn’t get skipped when exporting. This way, when unpacking the vrscene in Houdini, I get the entire network and I just have to unplug it from the proxy attribute and plug to a new displacement node there. Only issue I faced in this was, I had used input3D-plusMinusAverage nodes to in my maya node network, which were skipping any upstream nodes. So I replaced those with floatMath nodes which worked perfectly.

I guess node is not implemented for the plugin type “input3D-plusMinusAverage” is converted into. I could add it if needed if you could send me a .vrscene file.

>The Houdini node only has two input options (Color A & B), whereas The Maya node has Input 3D option with 3 inputs.

That’s just the way Maya draws inputs, and Houdini node has 5 inputs… It’ll be much appreciated if you could just send me the vrscene file.

Hi, I’ve attached the vrscene with the material network which has the mentioned nodes. Please let me know if you need anything.

Thank You
pmaNode_forForum.zip (1.13 MB)

Hey, @mr_poddar ,

I’ve logged a request in our tracker for adding the plugins needed to properly import the material network.

I’ll keep you posted.

Best regards!

Thanks a lot!! @Gosho.Genchev