Make arnold relative path optional in image nodes about arnold-usd HOT 4 CLOSED

Good point about the metadata, it will be cleaner indeed. Just a detail, we don't want to specify a relative path in the metadata, but just a boolean flag to let arnold deal with the search path as it usually does (through the global attribute options.texture_search_path)

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Issue synced internally to ARNOLD-14818

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How about storing this as metadata on the asset paths' attributes? I believe MaterialX for example does that in Houdini Solaris to specify the colorspace of a particular filepath being loaded. It's not a separate attribute but instead becomes metadata of the asset path.

As a quick example, see this screenshot:

Which looks e.g. like this in the usda file:

...
        def Shader "mtlximage1"
        {
            uniform token info:id = "ND_image_color3"
            asset inputs:file = @/path/to/my/file.exr@ (
                colorSpace = "ACES - ACEScg"
            )
            color3f outputs:out
        }
...

As such, we could e.g have attribute metadata like:

            asset inputs:file = @/path/to/my/file.exr@ (
                arnold_relative_path = "/path/to/search/path"
            )

Potentially we could have a special string value that could indicate using a 'global' search path as opposed to needing to author a search path per attribute - if that's something we'd ever need.

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but just a boolean flag to let arnold deal with the search path as it usually does (through the global attribute options.texture_search_path)

Great, even better!

What I like about the metadata is that you can set it per attribute, instead of per prim.

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