Procedural Workflow for LookdevX (Part 1): Creating Materials for a Paper Lamp

[@freshmaker4o]

Thank you for all the tutorials. Is there a way to maintain the procedural workflow between Maya interface, Bifrost and LookDevX? Currently, if I want to build the final stage that combines the geometry and material stages, I can only add the material via the interface and build it in LookDevX, but that way Bifrost is unaware of the new nodes created, so I cannot save the changes via Birfrost, thus breaking procedural workflow. The shaders available in LookDevX are not accessible via Birfrost, it is a bit frustrating...or is there something that I'm missing? I'm going for PBR setup.

[@lematt16]

Nice, is there a way to import materials directly from the hypershade to lookdevX and assign them to an USD Prim? thanks

[@Autodesk_Maya]

To use materials created in Hypershade in a USD stage, you need to first convert it to a USD material. Currently you can't export just Materials by themselves to a USD file, they must be assigned to a geometry to be exported to USD, and the assignment will be written into the USD file as well. At this moment, this is the way to do it: In Maya, assign the geometry with the materials created in hypershade, then export the Maya geometry with the assigned materials using "Export Selection". There you can set the Plugin Configuration to "Arnold", which converts materials to Arnold shaders in USD format. Also, under "Materials" in the export selection window, you can select MaterialX or/and USD preview surface for the same export. However, If your graphs are pure Arnold graphs in Hypershade, we would recommend exporting them to USD based Arnold shading graphs. MaterialX can be used for translating Maya native networks, but those shaders will be translated using Maya's MaterialX supplementary library which can only be rendered by 3rd parties that support the Supplementary MaterialX DCC's library.

[@sridharan5172]

Who is the instructor?

[@Autodesk_Maya]

Yingying Zeng!

[@mudoglu]

How do we use a relative path for the textures?

[@Autodesk_Maya]

Currently, in Maya 2024.1, relative paths are not supported in LookdevX UI. Users would need to manually edit a USD file and set relative paths according to Asset organization. For more details, please join LookdevX Beta forum where you can participate in designing and testing features and workflows.

[@mudoglu]

@@Autodesk_Maya Thanks for the info. I hope we get relative path in a future update. Its super important.