MaterialX

 

Applies a MaterialX look. The operator supports native Arnold shaders and the MaterialX standard library.

Enable

Enable/disable the operator. Disabled operators are bypassed when the operator graph is evaluated.

Inputs

Connected upstream operator nodes.

Selection

Selection expression. If the operator is connected to a procedural the selections are assumed to be relative to the procedural's namespace.

Filename

The MaterialX source document containing one or more looks. The source document can either be a file or an inline XML string.

Look

Current look variant name that should be used from the MaterialX document.

Assign Materials

Enables/disables material assignments.

Assign Properties

Enables/disables property assignments.

Assign Visibilities

Enables/disables visibility assignments.

The MaterialX operator takes a .mtlx document or an inline XML string with one or more look variants and carries out the assignments for a given look, including material, property, and visibility assignments.

 

All the native Arnold shaders and MaterialX standard library shaders are supported (see node definitions below). Native Arnold shaders are always chosen over the standard library by default if there's a conflict. Where applicable, the textures are pre-processed to achieve better performance and ensure the correct look (see below). Standard library nodes, node graphs, and shading models are turned into Arnold OSL code using the MaterialX shader generation.

 

The following combinations of shaders in materials and node graphs are supported:

• All shaders including the shading model and connected nodes and node graphs are native Arnold shaders.
• Arnold shading model with a mixture of Arnold shaders and standard library shaders connected as nodes or node graphs. Note that a connected node graph cannot mix Arnold and standard library shaders. It is either an Arnold shading graph which is translated to their respective Arnold nodes, or it is a standard library graph which is turned into a single OSL shading node.
• A standard library shading model defined using the PBR library. No Arnold shaders can be connected to this shading model. The shading model and all connected inputs are turned into a single OSL shader.

MaterialX node definitions

Arnold ships with node definitions for the built-in Arnold shaders which can be found in the Arnold installation at materialx/arnold/nodedefs.mtlx. The default node definitions can be set using the environment variable 'ARNOLD_MATERIALX_NODE_DEFINITIONS'.

 

Arnold also ships with the stdlib and pbrlib node definitions, node graphs, and code snippets for generating OSL shaders, where the files are located under materialx/stdlib and materialx/pbrlib, respectively.

Texture pre-processing and color space

Textures used in the standard library shaders are converted to .tx files to achieve better performance through mip-mapping etc. Color textures can also be subject to color conversion as part of the pre-processing. The target rendering color space is provided by Arnold's color management node. If no explicit color management is used the rendering space is assumed to be linear sRGB. The source color space is read from the active colorspace attribute in the MaterialX document. The color space attribute is inherited and can be set on the texture parameter, shader node, node graph, etc. Nothing is done if a texture's source and target space are the same. Data textures are assumed to be raw.

Search Path

Defines one or more locations to search for included mtlx files, where a semicolon is used to define separate paths. Environment variables are also supported using the Arnold bracket notation, e.g. [ARNOLD_PATH]. By default the search path is automatically set to find the Arnold node definitions. The operator also supports setting the default search path using the environment variable 'ARNOLD_MATERIALX_SEARCH_PATH'.