Shader assignments on references not being remembered

[TBFX]

Hi JimStar,

Shaders assigned to geometry from a referenced file are not being saved as reference edits in the current scene. So when you re-open the scene or try to batch render it these shader assignments are lost.

T.

[JimStar]

Shaders assigned to geometry from a referenced file are not being saved as reference edits in the current scene. So when you re-open the scene or try to batch render it these shader assignments are lost.

Both changing of existing materials, and assigning the new one - works for references on my machine, and is restored after reloading Maya and reopening the scene... Anyway - it is not the plugin's responsibility, the plugin just creates new Maya nodetypes using Maya's API, and Maya itself is responsible for create-store-restore the nodes of these types...
But anyway, it may be interesting to find the reason why it does not work on your side... Perhaps some differences in scenes or in workflow?..

[TBFX]

Yes, I've just tried a simple scene here and all works as expected. I have definitely had two cases where this problem occurred though. One where I'd added virtual materials to existing referenced octane shaders on some particle instances and one where I'd shaded some models from scratch after referencing them.

I will look further at the scenes that gave me the trouble and see if I can figure out what was different and possibly get a base and reference scene to you if I can reproduce it.

T.

[JimStar]

Yes, I've just tried a simple scene here and all works as expected. I have definitely had two cases where this problem occurred though. One where I'd added virtual materials to existing referenced octane shaders on some particle instances and one where I'd shaded some models from scratch after referencing them.

I will look further at the scenes that gave me the trouble and see if I can figure out what was different and possibly get a base and reference scene to you if I can reproduce it.

T.

Thank you!

[jangwee]

hey guys
resurrecting an old thread here instead of creating new one.

Did you guys ever figure out what was causing this problem?

I use references all the time and never had this issue until I started using Octane for rendering.
I've had this problem show up on different projects and I've never been able to figure out what was causing it.
It seems to lose connection to new shaders and when the reference is reloaded some objects have no shading group assigned at all, others are assigned the shaders from the referenced scene file.

[TBFX]

I have never reproduced this since so have never had anything to add that could help JimStar track it down. It's also very rear for me to change shader assignments on references as my normal workflow is to go back to the base file for shader connections. I'd normally only adjust shader attributes on references so I may not pick it up very often if it does still exists.

T.

[jangwee]

thanks mate.
I think i figured out what my issue was.
Seems to be problem with duplicate objects within referenced scene that didn't have unique names.
Likely Maya issue but not sure if specific to Octane node connections. Odd that after so many years I've never had this pop up til recently.

My workflow was to assign shaders/render settings on referenced animation scene so animation can continue while render setup can be done simultaneously in pipeline.

[TBFX]

My workflow was to assign shaders/render settings on referenced animation scene so animation can continue while render setup can be done simultaneously in pipeline.

Hi jangwee,

You may have very good reason to have this work flow but just in case it is of any use to you the way I would approach the above would be to have your animation assets as master files and reference them into the animation scenes. that way you can update the shaders on the master asset files and that will update all animation scenes at once. It also makes the animation scenes much faster to save while animators are working on them. Of course you should always keep a back up of each master when you update it in any way just in case the changes break the reference so that you can roll back to a working version.

Of course if your assets need different shaders for different animation scenes then this doesn't work so well.

T.