Isotropix Forums

Would it be possible to add the ability to link shading_variable associations to an external file?

For example, right now in a Shading Layer I can add something like the following:

woodMask = "/this/is/the/wood/mask.tx"
goldMask = "/this/is/the/gold/mask.tx"


What I would like to do instead is link the shading_variables field of the shading layer to something like this:
/path/to/shading/variable/declarationFile.txt


and that file would contain the associations listed above.

Basically we generate all of our textures in Mari and have a custom output script that writes the texture assignments to a text file (xml file in our case, but we can modify that). If we could then just link our shading variables to that text file it would automatically do all of our texture assignments for us.

Currently we are writing code to read that file and do the assignments, but that is still a fairly manual process. We have to update our Clarisse scene every time there is a change to the material assignments in Mari, and we have run the script for every entry of every shading layer.

Yes a "read from File" function would be really helpful !
So far that would only work with extra python processing this...

Hi,

this is a great suggestion. It should be possible once we introduce expressions in 4.0.

Hi,


so do I understand right that shading variables can currently not be read from alembic attribution?

Hi,

Indeed you can read strings in a geometry point cloud but not in a geometry poly mesh. It's a limitation on our side, (the function isn't exposed in Python for meshes...). I added an entry in our database to fix this. (ID#8550)

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Cheers