Native UDIM support?

[Arvid Björn]

Hey,

If anyone at Autodesk is listening, I'd like to talk about getting some support for UDIM and Mudbox's tiled numbering conventions. With Mari becoming the go-to tool for texturing, our workflow would obviously get a lot easier if I didn't have to load all those textures and build compounds for connecting them all. Arnold seems to have a simple enough solution where you just write "file.<udim>.tif" and then Arnie figures out the rest. Perhaps a specialized Image node would be a neat solution?

In the meantime, are there any good tricks for using UDIM in softimage that might not be obvious, and apart from creating compounds of mixers?

Thanks for listening!

[Alok Gandhi]

We have developed an in-house node in Arnold just to do that. I think the best solution for now is to compile your own render tree node for reading Mari Textures.

--

[Gene Crucean]

Completely agree. This is KILLING us on our current project. Soft and Maya.

--

-Gene

[Vincent Ullmann]

If you are using Arnold there is a build in support
https://support.solidangle.com/display/SItoAUG/Texture+Tokens

Never used this my self, but it seems to be there.... ;-)

[Arvid Björn]

Alok: Would that node of yours be adoptable to use with Mental Ray?

The big draw-back apart from the compound-building right now is that you have to keep all those textures referenced in Softimage in order to use manual UDIM tiling, but since there's no way to even see textures in context on geometry without rendering, they're just sit there hogging resources, and I guess they all need to be checked for new versions when you toggle back to Soft, creating potential lag. So much neater to simply have a reference to the first image in the sequence as you can do with Arnold.

[Alok Gandhi]

No, I do not think that node will work with mr.

--