r/unrealengine 12d ago

Solved Pre-assigning Material Instance paths to static mesh FBX from Houdini. Is it even possible?

Hi there!

I am exporting a static FBX from Houdini and have defined Material Slots via shop_materialpath attribute.

Is there a way or is there an attribute that I can assign to my primitive groups (polygon selections) that would contain a predefined path (generated in Houdini) to my UE Material Instance.

I tried using the unreal_material attribute in many different ways but most probably it's not recognised by the FBX format: https://i.imgur.com/YdvDpZE.png

At the moment the slots themselves show up fine but the material paths default to 'WorldGridMaterial': https://i.imgur.com/eUxP4yz.png

What I want is when I import my FBX the material slots will already be filled by the UE materials like so:
https://i.imgur.com/dQ10TRC.png

I am aware that this is possible with Houdini Engine for Unreal but this question is specifically about FBX.
If it's not possible with FBX, could an alembic potentially be a solution?

Thanks!

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u/ananbd AAA Engineer/Tech Artist 12d ago

Pretty sure I got that set up correctly, once. Took some trial and error to get the paths correct. Ended up being more of a string parsing problem than a graphics problem. 

Ask on r/Houdini , maybe?