[Houdini Newbie]Modo/Houdini workflow for rendering questions

[Andreas Galster]

Hi guys,

I'm an absolute Houdini beginner. I'm actually not a full-time 3D artist, I'm a graphic designer who occasionally does some 3D work at an ad agency.

We usually give out anything to freelancers that's not pre-viz, stills or simple animations. The goal is to use Houdini in conjunction with modo in the future.

I've been learning Houdini for about 2 weeks now and my boss showed me an already finished (and "simple") project which I should try to replicate.

The animations (which I can't show due to client NDA) is basically an animated displacement mapping of an object as well as particle morphing (both seperate animations - not in combination).

The object itself is always the same (topology), however when the new object is being formed it has different textures/shaders.

Since I have no experience with such workflows/projects I would like to know if the following workflow is possible before I begin experimenting. We would like to:

• Model the objects in modo.
  
• Do the basic animations in modo.
  
• Set up shaders in modo.
  
• Export to Houdini (probably via alembic or fbx?)
  
• Do VFX in Houdini and (now comes the crucial part)
  
• Bring the animation back into modo because we would like to render it with modo.
  

I was just wondering if this is actually possible. I have no idea how this behaves with morphing between objects in terms of assigned uvs and shaders.

Does the uv mapping still work within modo once it is re-imported from Houdini?

[Netvudu]

That is perfectly doable, only the shader thing should be done after you bring back stuff into Modo for rendering, not before you export to Houdini, as each render engine uses its own shaders.Also, I´m not sure what you mean by particle morphing.

I´ve been doing this between Lightwave and Houdini and it works pretty well except for the particle stuff which is a bit more tricky. Nowadays, I´d rather render the effects inside Mantra (you know, what happens in Houdini, stays in Houdini )

Edited October 22, 2013 by Netvudu

[Andreas Galster]

With particle morphing I mean something like this:

http://cmivfx.com/store/568-houdini+mograph+title+design

To illustrate the goal: Imagine I have the same object, just two different shaders.

I want to morph from img1 to img2 in a similar way as seen in the video above.

I would like to go back to modo so rendering or shader changes could still be done by someone beside me within modo (since nobody else is going to learn houdini).

http://img.webme.com/pic/w/wildeklasse/1134481144i17080.jpg

http://img.webme.com/pic/w/wildeklasse/1134481144i17080.jpg

So the question is: After I import the transition back into modo can I still apply correctly mapped textures to my objects? After all, all the meshes (voronoi fractured or whatever) will be raw cached meshes, right?