Some thoughts on the material graph

Hello nivdia,

I was playing around with the material graph today. It’s pretty cool to create materials this way, but I did run into some issues. First, it’s painfully slow at times, it feels like it’s recompiling the graph after every operation. I switched to a storm viewport hoping this would help, but no luck.

Some operations which would not require any shader compilation still were very slow ( box selecting a bunch of nodes for example).

Next, I tried to put some nodes in a subgraph ( is there a way to select a bunch of nodes and collapse, creating inputs and outputs automatically, I created a nodegraph and dragged and dropped in the stage treeview). After I did this, I could no longer connect the inputs of simple “substract” nodes I will attach a video to illustrate.

Also, I was unable to figure out how to zoom in and out of the graph with my wacom ( no mouse wheel) is there a shortcut for this?

Thanks,
Koen

Hi @koen2
We are aware of the slowness with the editor. There are couple of things that we’re working on.

  1. Currently we require compilation of the entire graph whenever there are topological changes. This is partially a limitation with DirectX and our generation of HLSL. We’re looking into compiling individual shaders and linking but this will require some work.

  2. We’re aware of this as well. This could be with how USD changes get pushed to Hydra. This is also a part of our planning for the next major editor update.

  3. We don’t have a group function to automatically move nodes into a USD NodeGraph, but as we rework the editor, we can add support for this. Great suggestion.

  4. Regarding the connecting inputs, if you have a repro USD, can you send it? It’s not exacltly clear what’s happening in the video. If you make a new connection to the Inputs node, does that make a connection? It does look like the types match so it’s likely a bug.

  5. For wacom support, I’m not sure what support we have. I’ll inquire with the Kit team.