topic Re: How to Shader override in Solaris in Arnold for Houdini Forum

How to Shader override in Solaris

martinkindl83 — Mon, 25 Nov 2024 23:05:10 GMT

Hello.

We are slowly moving to Solaris for production and i came to the stop, while trying to add globam material override.

I would like my whole scene to be rendred as greyshaded.

Normally i would use Material Operator (not supported in Solaris) or use Shader override from Arnold render settings (no tbeing present in Solaris).

I cant drop material assigns, as i have instance prototypes, which stops me from doing that.

Any thoughts?

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

Stephen.Blair — Thu, 28 Nov 2024 14:53:54 GMT

Hi Martin

Maybe with the Material Linker LOP ?

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

martinkindl83 — Mon, 02 Dec 2024 23:09:38 GMT

Hello Stephen.

Its not possible as i have references and point instances in the scene.

I was looking for the same functionality as we have in HtoA, where we can override all shaders

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

sebastien.blaineau.ortegaHRM3U — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 09:54:31 GMT

Hi Martin, we're currently working on exposing this feature in HtoA. We're hoping to make this available in a future HtoA release

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

martinkindl83 — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 10:14:12 GMT

Thank you. Have seen it in beta. Haven't had chance to test it

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

sebastien.blaineau.ortegaHRM3U — Thu, 12 Dec 2024 10:57:46 GMT

what you've see in beta is just the usd part, the integration in HtoA is still in progress.

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

martinkindl83 — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 04:02:16 GMT

Hello.

Can i please check how we are looking for shader overrides and operator support in general?

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

am_wilkins — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 13:11:53 GMT

Hello,

If you have references (assuming you mean "Asset Reference" nodes) then you should be able to see the materials for them in the Scene Graph?
In which case you could do an "Edit Property" on those materials base colour, etc. to modify them using wildcards etc. or create a new material and wildcard assign that to the references feeding the point instancer.

edit property example

assign new material example

Maybe I'm misunderstanding the scene setup however!

best,

amwilkins

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

v_katkar — Wed, 13 Aug 2025 00:50:00 GMT

Hi,
We too are in the same boat and are currently moving all our production work to Solaris using Arnold.

In order to have the whole scene rendered using a grey shader, currently we use the unassignmaterial LOP node along with Houdini Primitive Patterns to globally unassign all material bindings followed by a Material Library LOP with the grey shader and again use Houdini prim patterns to assign the grey shader. You may have to tweak the prim patterns depending on the USD prim types in your scene.

Hope this helps in the interim while Arnold devs implement a global shader override.

Best,
Vidu

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

joaquim.moral — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 13:37:21 GMT

Hi @martinkindl83

Did the information provided by @am_wilkins and @v_katkar answer your question?
If so, please use Accept Solution so that others may find this in the future.

If not, let us know so we can keep helping you.

Thank you very much!

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

martinkindl83 — Mon, 25 Aug 2025 22:17:05 GMT

hello.

non of the above solutions solve the problem for us.

What we are looking for, is the same functionality as on Arnold Render rop, to be able override from single place all shaders in the scene.

And support for Operators

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

sebastien.blaineau.ortegaHRM3U — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 09:51:09 GMT

As we already said previously, this feature request is on our radar and we're hoping to get it done. It had to be postponed a bit due to higher priorities, but it's still a feature request that we want to tackle. The suggestions that were done are means to workaround the missing feature, but they won't completely replace it. So this thread shouldn't be resolved yet

Re: How to Shader override in Solaris

martinkindl83 — Tue, 26 Aug 2025 23:55:21 GMT

thank you Seb