Hiding objects when then need to be gone.

[revelationsr]

I have in the past asked a few questions about bringing stuff to Maya. I managed to work my own method out because there seems to be no real and straight forward way to do it. Which is very disappointing.

 

Basically I have several bricks that I am using a copy to multiply. I wanted to bring across bricks and their colour to maya though an alembic cache . Sound like it should simple. Ha! The fun.

 

So the work around I came up with is that I make polygons instead of bricks. Point zero will be the location in space and point two will be offset to represent the colour. Point three will be rotation and so on. Once I get it into Maya I then run it through a script which reads this information and rebuilds the bricks. Crazy work around but it works. Sadly is also allot simpler than the other options.

 

Anyway here is the unexpected issue I am having. Lets say there are 10 bricks on frame one. But then on frame 2 there are only 8 bricks. Those extra 2 bricks just sort of hangs around in maya in the last location they where needed. In houdini they are just not displayed. But running it though alembic it seems to reuse the bricks instead of creating new ones. So for example. if frame 1 has 10 bricks and frame 2 has 8. Then I would have guessed that there would be 18 bricks in total. With just the visibility turned on and off. Instead there are 10 bricks in total with the extra 2 just hanging out when not used.

 

Is there a way that I can force houdini to either move the unused copies to one side, well out of the way. Or can I force it to create a new set of bricks for each frame. Really either way would work for me.

 

Also A side note. This alembic cache only has 1800 polygons in it. But for some reason it takes ages to load up in maya. 1800 pollys is barely a character these days. Anyone knows what is up with that?

 

CHeers