Rendering vertex color in Maya (Maya 2019, Arnold 3.2.2)

[askinner6CDVL]

Hi I'm trying to render a scene with a ton of objects that have vertex colors applied. What is the easiest way to set up a shader to render that? I read the help files and it suggests to add an attribute to each object (shapeNode) I want to render with vertex colour then use aiuserdatacolor, however I have thousands of objects and manually doing that is not an option (and I don't want to get into any scripting). I saw a tutorial where they used colorSets and used the colorSet name in the aiuserdatacolor node to render that but it doesn't work for me. Has anyone got a good workflow for doing something like this?

cheers - Aten

[Stephen.Blair · Accepted solution]

vertex color will be exported as user data. you might have to enable a check box, but you don't have to add an attribute

[askinner6CDVL]

capture.jpgcapture2.jpg

Wow, thanks for quick reply! The manual must be out of date then as it talks about setting up attributes..

But see this scene I have a object with 1,0,0 vertex color. I set it up to use colorSet1 in the shader but it still renders with the default color from the shader instead of the vertex colors from the color set. I also have export vertex colors checked on the object (if that matters)

[askinner6CDVL]

capture3.jpg

Ah I seem to have got it working! Changing the viewport from arnold to viewport2 and back and it seems to have updated 🙂

[Anonymous]

Hey, I am having the exact same difficulties you had with this about year ago. I am trying to import an alembic cache from Houdini, but I can't seem to get the color vertex appear on a AiStandardSurface, even with the aiUserdatacolor node. The vertex color appears fine on the default lambert, but that isn't too useful.

Do you recall any important details that helped you solved this problem?

[Stephen.Blair]

Your question is different. The original question, from last year, was about shapes created in Maya. Please ask a new question.