maya to houdini to maya

[itriix]

Just looking for some advice. I'm helping a friend with some "rocket booster" jet pack fire/particles... and some landing dust hits... Their file is in maya. I exported the necessary pieces as obj, brought it into houdini, turned it into bgeo. and i'm able to create my particles.

couple questions:

1. for the camera, i used fbx export from maya, and imported it into houdini. it brought in a camera, but looks like the resolution is wrong? ideas?

2. the "rocket booster" fire, should cast light onto the "surrounding" environment, and "a character"... they will be rendering their work in maya. so looking for advice on, how to get my particles to LIGHT their characters?

I thought about, possibly I could instance point lights to the particles. and turn off all shaders and other lights in the scene. and render a pass of just the lighting/shadow information on the environment/character. and then they could use that in comp to multiply with their maya render layers... (really not sure... that's why i came here to see what everyone thought)

If instancing point lights to the particles would work, would there be a way to adjust the intensity of the instanced point lights based on the particles life or the alpha attribute? If so, any hints on that?

Thanks,

Jonathan

Edited April 25, 2010 by itriix

[dbukovec]

hi!

For camera transfer i'm using chandump.mel from highend3d.com, it outputs .chan file which i can load into CHOPS and export the curves to a camera ( i made a simple asset to use this).

This is better than fbx, since fbx will bake the curves onto your cameras and it is not refreshable if the camera is changed in a shot.

For characters, You can use maya geometry caching with double precision, and export the geometry with geo cache option in the fbx dialog ( and choose a set).

Then when importing geo and animation into houdini don't forget to choose unlock deformation and geometry checkboxes, otherwise your files will be huge.

hope it helps

cheers

[itriix]

thanks dbukovec!

i ended up using OEBlaster for exporting the geometry as obj's... I've used it in the past to just export some objs but never actually brought it BACK into maya after i was done so we'll see how that goes.

as of now, i "kind of" figured out how to get the light instancing on my particles to work. i'm having a workflow issue though:

i have a particle network, i set up a light template, with mantra point light shader and mantra shadow shader on it. I use the "instance" shelf tool, to select my particles, and select my light template, and then "choose "YES" to modify my geometry to work with point instancing. problem is, now the particles won't render... how can i use those same particles WITHOUT the instance node/point instancing? I created a new geometry node, and thought i could pull in the particles somehow... but can't figure it out!

any ideas?

(the only bad fix that i can think of, for NOW, is just to duplicate the pop network and use it for the actual PARTICLE rendering... but that's TWO of the same popnet running. seems stupid)

cheers,

Jonathan

Edited April 25, 2010 by itriix

[dbukovec]

i think that You should start another topic on that, but also watch Peter Quint's tutorial on this topic Light Instancing

Edited April 25, 2010 by dbukovec