Sassy Materials | Automatic PBR material network setup and texture assignment 1.0.0 for Maya (maya script)

Hello!

I'm proud to present my first actually user friendly (kind of) script here on this website.
It's based on a small tool I found a whole while back for automatic shading network setup, but it had tons of problems and still required a lot of tweaking by hand afterwards. I always find myself doing the same thing over and over again, opening file nodes, assigning textures, making sure they are in the right colorspace, and frankly, I've had enough, so I made this.

 

Sassy Materials (it's the greatest name ever, I know, trust me) is a script that automagically sets up material networks
as defined by presets, that are stored in a JSON file. Documentation is included on how to set up these presets for your preferred render engine, and presets for ReshiftMaterial, aiStandardSurface and of course the standard lambert are included.

There's even some functionality in the tool itself to help you figure stuff out about the nodes you work with! All of this is documented.

The presets even include some sections where you can literally inject python in between what the script is doing, which is helpful for 
making custom presets.

If I can find a more user friendly way to do something like this in the future with some kind of syntax that gets interpreted,
then I will implement it at some point.
You can also define naming conventions you like using, since those are used for automatic texture lookup. It's all very modifyable and preset based.

 

Installation instructions are included.

A general workflow would look like this:

1. Click "Browse root folder" and navigate to where your textures are stored.
When you have a folder in your "Root search folder" line, you can then either

2. a- Use the "Browse" buttons for each kind of map. It'll automatically jump to the root search folder, and if that's not set,
it'll stay in the same directory as the maya file.

2. b- Use the Autosearch by choosing a naming convention from the texture names tab, pressing reset prefixes to apply it, selecting the maps you want to search for with the checkboxes, and then pressing "Autosearch in folder". It can be a bit bothersome if there are multiple materials worth of textures in one folder. That's bad practise, but, it happens. For that, use "Additional substring search" to make sure you grab the right texture files.
For example, if in a folder you had both "cloth_red_DiffuseColor.png" and "cloth_blue_DiffuseColor.png", you'd put "blue" in the substring search to
filter the blue variety of the texture.

3. After all your filenames are in place, you can then name your material in the "Material name" tab,
Check the checkboxes of all the file nodes you want to construct, and choosing a preset for what kind of material you want to make.
Check out the extra options for inverting the Opacity map, and enabling UDIM settings too.

From then on out, you can just modify your material as you see fit.

I hope some of you get some use out of this,

Much love, Sas.

UPDATE V1.1:
I added a 2022 python 3 compatible version. Use the different initiation script provided in the documentation,
and the different scripts in the folder scripts_2022_py3.