Siavash Tehrani

From my understanding of it, there are a couple of ways that applications and renderers can support MaterialX: .mtlx documents and/or through USD.

From the Houdini docs: "Solaris and Karma utilze MaterialX through UsdMaterialX". Unless you go through the process of exporting and hand-editing .mtlx documents out of VOPs, MaterialX out of Houdini ends up as UsdShade networks. I think in order for other apps/renderers to faithfully recreate complex MaterialX mats from Houdini they would need to have solid USDMaterialX support. I can't speak to Omniverse or Unreal, but from my testing there are a lot of things that don't work right in the latest versions of Renderman and V-Ray. Maybe Arnold does a better job?

At the moment I get the impression that when you hear this or that application has MaterialX support, it's really more in the limited context of textures feeding into Standard Surface. Most of the .mtlx files floating around out there seem to fit that mold.

As far as out-of-spec nodes, Karma subnets have some goodies that will only work for Karma, whereas MaterialX subnets should only allow you to tab in nodes that are part of the spec I believe.


Happy to be corrected if any of that is wonky.

Instead of splitting the mesh into different prims you could use your groups to set up Geometry Subsets. That way you maintain a continuous mesh, but have separate prims underneath to apply materials to.

tamte

tbay312
if you want to have real fun though, load your scene in Omniverse, turn on iRay's Caustic Sampler and watch your detailed caustics appear almost real time, it feels like magic

That sounds lovely. Can we get that SideFX?
Meanwhile the caustics at home. 10,000 samples with XPU and optix denoiser. I'll have to try CPU with path guiding.




Btw Tyler, if you are doing any sort of comparisons with refractive surfaces, one thing to watch out for is the Enable Internal Reflections setting in H20: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/93357/ [www.sidefx.com]