Deborah R. Fowler
Houdini Material Style Sheets:
Posted Sept 24 2017
Material style sheets provide a way of assigning randomized materials, particulary on crowd agents. Mantra applies stylesheets at render time.
Highly recommended places for information:
- SideFX documentation on Material Stylesheets (H16) including a Material Stylesheets Quickstart (H15)
- Mark Tucker's H15 Masterclass | Material Stylesheets (approx 50 minutes)
- user tutorial relate to blob by Mikael Pettersen - Lead Crowd TD at MPC (UK)
Other:
- other interesting posts by the above at http://shortandsweet3d.blogspot.com/
- he also offers a Crowds
for Feature Film in Houdini but this is not free
- to overcome the limitation of not being able to select and apply materials to geometry inside a packed primitive - allowing material changes of instanced geometry and crowd agents at render time
- for studios that use IFD files to make changes (not applicable in our case)
Where?
- on the mantra command line using the -S option
- in a scene (.hipnc) file
- stylesheet parameters
- stylesheet on primitives using a material_stylesheet attribute (say on a packed primitive)
Priority goes to the last stylesheet override encountered.