1. Overview & Purpose

To maintain a clean, automated, and predictable pipeline, all assets must adhere strictly to our lookdev and material naming standards. Consistency is critical for our automated publishing tools, lookdev transfer scripts, and engine import pipelines.

This specification serves as the foundational bridge between asset-creation tools (Maya/Houdini) and our texturing suite (Substance Painter). By organizing material networks correctly at the source, we establish dependencies that automate texture baking, material assignment, and layout visibility.

2. The Core Naming Rule

Every material network requires two primary nodes to be named according to the asset or material prefix:

⚠️ Critical Requirement: The prefix for both the material and its corresponding shading group must match exactly. Do not use different descriptive names for the material and its shading group.

Node Specifications

  1. Materials (_MTL): The material node holds the surface attributes (e.g., Standard Surface, Arnold AI Standard Surface, Houdini VOP networks).
  2. Shading Groups (_SG): The shading group (or shading engine) node handles the object assignment and connects the displacement, volume, and surface shaders.

3. Scene Hierarchy & Mapping

When viewing your shading network in your DCC's Node Editor, Hypergraph, or Outliner, the visual and physical mapping relationship must align like this:

Material Node (_MTL) Shading Group Node (_SG) Target Geometry Group
gold_MTL ➔ gold_SG ➔ pSphere_gold
glassTinted_MTL ➔ glassTinted_SG ➔ window_geo
tireRubber_MTL ➔ tireRubber_SG ➔ wheel_L_geo

4. Material Groups & UDIM Relationships

Complex assets requiring multiple texture tiles (UDIMs) or lookdev variations use the material group structure to scale cleanly without breaking downstream asset dependencies.

Material Groups (Asset Variations)

If an asset has multiple material variations (e.g., a character with a "Clean" and a "Muddy" version), the Material Group name is inserted directly before the standard suffix.