I'm using userdata on objects to drive the color of objects but cant get the userdata tag to work. Is that not supported by Arnold? will it eventually?
You can read the user data in a shader network via the user_data shaders. Check out this tutorial.
The User Data tag (or any tag with a user data) is not supported at the moment. You can specify user data only on the object itself.
Just checking the status on this. Is this something that will eventually be supported?
Sorry for the delay on this, we were focusing on the Arnold 7 release lately. I'll try to schedule it for the next release.
I'm back to this topic now. It's not obvious to me how do you want to use the User Data tag exactly. According to the documentation it does not hold any value, it's just an indicator, that the object has user data.
The User Data tag does nothing in and of itself. The User Data Tag will help to have a much more transparent organization of the Object Manager, especially in studios, with more than one artist working on a project. There is no additional functionality in terms of User Data entries.
You can of course specify user data on the tag instead of the object, but that's not specific to the User Data tag and not what it's designed for.
I attached an example of how I'm hoping this tag would work.
Instead of having to copy and paste user data onto an object I was hoping that the user data tag would propagate onto the object, which would allow you to quickly drop it on a new mesh without having to click through the dialogs. And possibly even assign user data hierarchically, i.e. put a user data tag on a null and it would propagate onto all of the geometry below it.