Maya Geometry Cache -> Houdini?

[Akabane]

Yo there, i'm trying to import an animated mesh from maya to houdini for further manipulation.

Now, it's a skinned rigged mesh, i animated a walk cycle and wanted to import that to houdini.

If i bake the anim and export as fbx no animation gets imported.

I heard about using geometry cache to achieve that. But the maya geometry cache format is .mcc, is that readable by houdini? I guess not natively. So is there any way to import an animated obj into houdini from maya?

I tried a couple searches but that's it, they say "use geometry cache", but...

Thanks, and sorry if i missed the topic if this question was already asked.

Akabane

[Netvudu]

what about a obj. geometry sequence?

[Akabane]

Thought of that but i cannot do it, because i need to be able to modify the anim curves with CHOPS.

Sigh.

What's everyone workflow to export rigged/skinned/animated geometry from maya to houdini? ç_ç

[Marc]

It could be possible to write out your animation curves and convert them to a chan file, but that's not really going to help you. If it's a character then you'll need to bring in the bones, weighting etc. for those curves to have any meaning.

As far as I know everyone else just brings in a geo cache, either sequential obj's or an mdd type point cache. But then that doesn't allow you to modify the original animation curves. You could bring the geo points in to CHOPS and modify those, but I don't think that's what you're asking?

M

[old school]

FBX should do a decent job of bringing in your rigged character with animation, bones and skin weights. If the animation isn't coming in then there is a bug.

Note: There is a bug with the Autodesk FBX 2010 on the Mac that doesn't give access to the actual capture weighting information needed to build the nodes in the skin Object. If you are on the mac, you may want to do the conversion on linux or PC where it does work or do a quick hand-off to support at sidefx.com to have it converted for you.

ADSK should have fixed this for 2011 on the mac. One hopes anyway.

Once in Houdini, you tweak the channels that are in CHOPs as Marc mentioned above.

Edited April 28, 2010 by old school

[anim]

since this thread is about geometry cache, i assume you are not talking about animation curves on bones but animation curves of individual points of the cache

FBX should import pointcache if it has been exported either as CHOP channels (locked) or with live reference to FBX file according to your preference

but obj sequence should work too and if you bring your imported sequence into CHOPs through Geometry CHOP in Animated mode you should have perfectly fine anomation curves whose you can modify further and apply on source mesh (not animated)

or you can save that curves and you have something like pointcache file

or you can export mdd using this obj sequence to have mdd pointcache file

[ikarus]

fbx should work, i'd use the 2009 export build as it has been the most stable for me, newer versions have had problems.

Edited May 3, 2010 by ikarus

[mightcouldb1]

I've had good luck with FBX. You could also use point oven, but that costs money. One other thing you can do is use a plug-in that someone wrote to export/import bgeo sequences (it's unbarabley slow to import), or you can use the OEBlaster MEL script to export an obj sequence though I've had trouble with import. FBX is the fastest because I believe that it only imports the geometry once and then applies transformation using the point cache.

Good Luck.