Material overrides on instanceable prims in Maya?

Community USD
1

Using the Alab I’m finding that I cannot edit the materials on an asset that lives under instancable prims. I get the error:

"authoring to an instance proxy is not allowed."

My expectation is that it should be possible to create an override for the material using an inherit arc.

From the Asset Structure Guidelines:

"Inherits and Classes

Inheriting from class prims is a way to set up USD assets for flexibility down the road. There are a lot of ways that inherits can be used to build powerful assets in USD, but it is recommended that models inherit from just one to start. Examples of edits made via inherit arcs could be variant selections, material overrides, or even new primitives. Broadcasting overrides via inherits is one way to make changes to scene graph instances."

and

“To materialize instances, particularly in larger assembly, the inherited class prims can broadcast material bindings to the relevant models.”

Am I understanding correctly that this would be the proper workflow (a material override on the inherited class of the instanced prim)? Is this currently supported in Maya USD? It would appear that it is not, but I just wanted to confirm. If not, how are others handling this?

2

Hi Derek,

in general yes, especially when using instanceable, edits should be performed as part of composition arcs, so creating a class with your edits and then inheriting that on the elements you want those edits to applied on, is the way to go.
Not just for Materials, though.

You can also check the implicit prototypes generated in the stage, based on all your edits.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the confirmation. Curious if this is supported in Maya? That is, how would you apply a material override?