You can open the Preset Browser by adding a tab/panel in Houdini > New Pane Tab Type > RenderMan Preset Browser
Presets include categories for light rigs, environment lights, and materials.
Saving/Exporting a material is easy!
For convenience, you can also drag and drop the PxrMaterialBuilder to save the asset. Select the node, click and hold the left mouse button, drag the node onto the Preset Browser tab, and let go of the mouse button. |
Give it a useful name and any desired metadata for your pipeline
The same as materials, you can also drag and drop your light nodes onto the Preset Browser tab to create light rigs. |
Importing/Using a saved light rig
Changing the map is as easy as double-clicking another environment map asset!
If a PxrDomeLight object node is not selected when importing a map, the Preset Browser will automatically create one for you. |
When an asset is saved to disk, all its dependencies are saved to disk too.
These include :
These dependencies can increase the size of a preset on disk and you should bear that in mind if you want to distribute them over the internet.
RenderManAssets have been designed to be easily transferable from one application (like Houdini) to another (Katana, Maya, Blender, etc) and vice-versa.
Still, it is possible to run into compatibility issues if your material contains native Houdini nodes. To mitigate these problems, each RenderManAsset maintains a list of used nodes and use it to evaluate the preset's compatibility with the current host application and display a warning if it is not compatible.
The system will check :
If you want to ensure cross-application compatibility, avoid non-Pixar BxDFs and Patterns.
RenderMan ships with a standard library that can be found in : $RMANTREE/lib/RenderManAssetLibrary
We recommend that you copy the standard library to a location of your choice and leave the default library untouched as a backup. The new copy should be readable and writable. The asset browser will not allow you to create new assets if it points to a non-writable location. |
The location of the asset library can be set through the RMAN_ASSET_LIBRARY
environment variable.