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Soft|3D srt to Houdini?


miguel m

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First a small introduction...

I've been asked to do a second animation of an old project I did on Softimage|3D. Back in the day I did it using Phoenixtools Particle Suite and although I finished it I had a some trouble outputting those particles to rib. sooo...

This time I've thought to do the particle work on Houdini, export the geometry as a sequence of rib snippets and get them into soft through RiReadArchive calls. So far I've got this to work fine. Nice

What I can't figure now is how to transfer the transforms of the particle sources, obstacles, etc I've animated in soft3d into houdini so that i can do the actual particle stuff with an accurate reference.

Is there a way "out of the box" or will i need to do some massaging of files around?

Thanks for reading.

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I don't know how you'd get the transforms out from si3d but there's too ways you can import external transforms onto objects:

- via the Object CHOP

- via the objparent on|off hack along with opinput (for v5+) <but this requires scripting)

The Object CHOP is fairly self-explanatory but it will require adding extra parent nulls to your objects before you can load the keyframe info from si3d into CHOPs to override the particle sources.

If you want to go the scripting route to automate the process, then I could help you out if you want.

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Thank you Steven. Yesterday I had a quick look at the .chan file format. Rows and columns of raw data and all that...

I think I'll try exporting an ascii dotXSI file from soft3d and see what i can do with it. I believe it can export raw curves as well.

I'm starting to see the light, thanks.

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