by JimStar » Sat Sep 26, 2020 11:19 pm
JimStar
Sat Sep 26, 2020 11:19 pm
What you get with "octane -sdb octaneDiffuseMaterial" is is not a plugin-level functionality, the plugin just uses Octane API to store by its "-sdb" command. And this Octane API does not have any parameters - it just opens the UI dialog you see.
You need to ask the standalone team about that, maybe they could implement what you need (the headless export) on the API level for plugins...
But I'm not sure that this is what you need. Because even if you export some material to LiveDB, importing it later back will be creating a new material nodes-tree and assign it to some objects, so the previously assigned tree will need to be deleted - otherwise you'll be collecting unused garbage with every import.
I'm actually not sure that you are trying to reach you goal the right way. IMHO you could just write some complex Python export script in Maya that uses standard Maya's Python API to store the nodes with their attributes' values into some ASCII file. This is nothing to do with Octane or any other plugin - this is a standard Maya feature, you can do this for any shaders, not just for Octane. You can open any Maya's .MA scene file (which is ASCII) in a text editor and see how Maya stores its shader nodes and their attributes. And then you can read your file by other Python script in Houdini and create these Houdini nodes assigning their attributes with values stored in this exported file...
But be prepared to write a big complex Python script, that knows all the node-types and their attribute-names in both Maya and Houdini and knows how to match them to each other... Doable, but it's a big task for your Python coders...