Material X

“Material X is a open standard for transfert of rich material and look-development content between application and renderers. Originated at Lucasfilm in 2012…”

That would be cool to support in Blender, right ? :slight_smile:

Material X

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This whole concept is awesome. However Blender integration could be a little ways off for a couple of very important reasons. Firstly, Blender will need Alembic support. Currently MaterialX has been created with Alembic in mind. While I wouldn’t call this a necessity, I would say that anyone thinking about tackling this development challenge would be crazy to start before Alembic is implemented.

My second reason, is that we should wait and see what applications decide to pick this up. From the looks of it, Autodesk products will be getting this exportable-format included in their products. It would be useful to allow Blender to interface with Maya and Max beyond just geometry exports. Theoretically, if this was implemented underneath Cycles, you could do whatever you wanted in Blender and pass it off to a Maya or Max user.

However, because this would be implemented specifically for Cycles, it doesn’t really make sense to do so until the devs for various render engines such as Vray, Arnold, Maxwell and Octane (also Redshift), implement it as well. Now again, theoretically, you “could” write a converter that converts cycles materials into the same “language/file format” as MaterialX, but that’s an additional challenge on top of everything you’d need to do to get started.

Yeah, let see how to make it since it is new but I think Blender 2.8x open the door for next-generation so cycles, vray, maxwell, etc… can have a common output as rendering cause for photorealistic is similar in different software.

Hope Material X will work as awesome :slight_smile:

Bump !
(sorry necropost :woozy_face:)

Low priority

Yeah… The industry standards are low priority it seems. Or they ignore them.
Look how long it took them to implement UDIm’s for instance…

USD Hydra plugin for Blender v1.0.0 beta

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This is an beta release of the Hydra Rendering Addon for Blender.

Our main goal is to open new workflows of using USD and MaterialX in Blender. This allows:

  • Assembling and manipulating USD data
  • Referencing USD files, not just import and export so they don’t have to be in Blender memory
  • Importing and converting MaterialX networks.
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Has anyone had any luck getting Material X to work in Blender 3.0 using the USD Hydra Plugin? I can download the materials through the Material tab while I have Hydra selected for rendering using the built in Radeon ProRender that ships with it. But nothing shows up when I do render.

I also cannot seem to find a step-by-step tutorial for setting up and rendering Material X materials in Blender 3.0.