cylibral Posted July 27, 2004 Share Posted July 27, 2004 Hey Guys sorry if this has been answered before, I'm doing a thesis project that i will be using MAYA and Houdini side by side in production of my VFX short. It;s about 1:30 to 2 mins worth of animation. So my question is how seamless is working between the two in production . Has anyone did projects requiring to use them both interchangably? And if they can breath some light to this... I want to use Houdini for all the fx and maya for the character animation.. thank you very much in advance ... George Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mark Posted July 27, 2004 Share Posted July 27, 2004 hi, well i can say they do it all the time - but cant give many details on the challenges you face do you plan to export the animated geometry from maya to houdini? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cylibral Posted July 29, 2004 Author Share Posted July 29, 2004 WEll most of what i wa thinking of was to do all the particle fx and destruction scenes that i have in Houdini as well as flock of birds that fly around. ANd the rest of it being done in maya for the characater aniamtion and modeling. Shake to composite. So my thing was if it is recomended to do this.. As the i feel particles and fx are better in Houdin then they are in MAYA. Since this is a school thesis project i didn;t know if it;s recommended to do something like this... i just wosh the Rigid body dynamics were abit stronger. sorry this is just me talking out of my #** ... Either way Houdini is awesome...... George 3d mind body and soul Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Marc Posted July 29, 2004 Share Posted July 29, 2004 Hey George Well if all you're doing is compositing the end result together, then it makes no difference what software you use to achieve the elements. Most big companies use a mix of Maya/Houdini/XSI/Lightwave basically anything including in house software to do work and then comp it all together at the end. If you want to transfer scenes across, then its a little trickier but it can be done. Ciao Marc Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cylibral Posted July 31, 2004 Author Share Posted July 31, 2004 Thanks Marc, Yeah i was thinking about that to just composite it all together in later but would that affect the over all feel to it at all. Becuase most of the modeling would be done in Maya since i'm not too versed in Houdini as to be doing a huge project like this as the main package. I am mostly versed in the fx part of it. I would love to do the whole thing in Houdini if i knew how to use it for everything. So it's only the fx part of it that I would be mixing Maya scenes into Houdini for the destruction of the models. I wondering if there is any update on the new rigid body dynamics engine for houdini yet. I hear it's supposed to be really good . So I would love to learn more Houdini to not have to model and animate in MAYA since it's also a pain sometimes I wish it worked like Houdini sometimes. So yeah I would be mixing and matching and outputing it with either renderman or mental ray ... for my senior thesis at school. George Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aracid Posted August 3, 2004 Share Posted August 3, 2004 hey cylibral Im trying to also get some sort of pipeline between the two apps, i find it absolutely no problem to go from maya to houdini, with regard to geom, and camera, theres a little post in the maya to houdini section about that but from houdini to maya is less intuitive, ive read something about using blend shape, to blend between imported geom from houdini to maya, and then deleteing its history, but thats if u choose to go back to maya. lately my question when attempting this, is to choose which package i want to render with, because thats where you are going to do your shading and texturing, and as far as i know, even though u can bake ur textures out in maya and use those files in houdini, and then if u use prman, u can also transfer the shaders across, but at this point i would wonder what your thesis is about then, because if u start writing a million apps to try glue the two packages together, how much time are u gonna have to do hot effects? how far are u so far with the research u've done? cause i'd be quiet keen to share some scripts. i think it would be great to have a tool/toolbox that can do what you discussing. all the best aracid Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
craiglhoffman Posted August 3, 2004 Share Posted August 3, 2004 You are here on OdForce, so check out the information already on this topic: http://www.odforce.net/tips/ got to the bottom (or just go to this link): http://www.odforce.net/tips/h2m.htm I prefer to export baked OBJ's from Maya using the plugin listed and then do the rest of the work in Houdini. You can get geometry velocity info etc. for particles and dynamics work on your baked geometry in Houdini by using the Blend SOP. Animating camera stuff is a bigger pain in the butt, though, and I suggest you do your camera and rendering all in Houdini if possible. Cheers, Craig Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
edward Posted August 5, 2004 Share Posted August 5, 2004 A warning though. Maya's .OBJ exporter tends to output random point orders so don't expect point orders to remain consistent coming from Maya. PS. Why would you want to go back to Maya? It's much easier if you set it up from Maya and then render from Houdini. In H7, you have Renderman shader networks (like slim except with a useable network editor) so there's really no reason to go back the other way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cylibral Posted August 6, 2004 Author Share Posted August 6, 2004 Thanks for the help you guys . I really apprectiate all the advice you have given me on this .. Well Eward i Wish we had H7 at school to do just that but i'm kind of cheating the way the schoool is set up it;a basically a MAYA school. I am running Houdini from Home. Hopefully they will get a H7 in school so we can use to learn it and use ti.. We have Renderman there but it;s thru MAYA MTOR .. If they do get h7 that i can render with out water marks then i would put renderman through H7 . i'm sort of going on my own with this well not really asking you awesome houdini gurus for help on how to achieve this . I got permission to mix and match what ever i know in applications to create the end result. Hopefully when i'm all donee i can send it to SESi for the student reel if they have one. But thank you guys very much on giving me advice ... thanks for the tips... George Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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