maya vs houdini

[symek]

Hi guys,

What about referencing? In Maya we can reference characters, props, and environment into the scene where the animator animate.

Can we do the same in Houdini?

I tried digital assets but it removes all my keyframe when I refresh my objects.

Been figuring for two days and I still can't figure out the equivalent in Houdini.

Anyone can shed light on this?

You can reference pretty much everything in Houdini for a long time now (6 years or so). Any node(s) in Houdini can be HDA'ed, thus anything can be referenced. The point is that your channels are apparently placed on a HDA surface, not inside, thus they are saved in a hip file, not inside the otl. What makes sense, since HDA is a definition (or 'class' according to programming nomenclature), not an instance. Once you close your animation inside hda, it will be carried along with it.

Albeit an animation can be saved outside a scene in many ways: as baked meshes (most popular method I suppose for a couple of reasons), as *.chan or *.clip files via Chops, or as a subset of hip file (mwrite -c flag, see: http://www.sidefx.co...mmands/mwrite).

cheers,

skk.

AFAIK referencing animated character as a full rig is perhaps the last choice in pipelines I'm aware of, but this of course depends on many details...

ps oh, stupid me, I forgot to mention that in fact you have an option to save animation to a hda parameters (see Operator Type Properties), but this is quite dangerous from a pipeline wise perspective, since you can't recognize which asset was changed by an user (accidentally or not), and which matches referenced otl. This also makes difficult to build a scene procedurally for example to send it to farm. Once your channels are locked inside, you are save (well, more or less).

Edited November 12, 2010 by SYmek

[exu]

Hi Guys!

I'm very impressed by posts!

there's no any other user forum in the world that this kind of question they would have answered with so polite, positive manner that i saw here!

try to do similar question on xsi base, cgtalk(maya/XSI/c4d sub forum), etc, for example to see how fast this thread will become a flame and pointless debate…

As Houdini and Maya user, i'm suffering a lot, with pointless, useless, endless......... discussions!

So, my answer to the original post is,

if you came here to get information, you got it !

or try in other user forums to see what you get!

And this is definitively is a great start point, right?

Cheers

Edited November 12, 2010 by exu