Pipeline Workflow - Animation to DOPs

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So, i am coming from Maya, and have worked a few Projects where we mostly get the

cached animated Assets from the Animation Department.

in Maya i would duplicate the shapes i need in my sim or easily parent constraint some reduced geo,

use as colliders or do some other stuff with it.

 

how do we do that in Houdini when the animation is fixed and comes from keyframes or from alembic

or as FBX into Houdini.

 

..how do i get the Animation in to my DOPSim ? not the alembic into Houdini.. that is clear so far.

 

thx  deHeavy

[jim c]

I've been fiddling with this a bit, so I'll take a stab at this. If you just have an object and you want it to collide, for example, a ball that goes through some gas/liquid, or a character that interacts with cloth. You can make the ball a static DOP object (see the Static Object in the RBD shelf). If you need to use RBD objects then there's the RBD Keyframe Active DOP that can control where the position data is coming from. Peter Quint has some tutorials online that go into more detail here.

 

[3__]

see attached

You can bring it in as an RBD object, check 'use deforming geometry'.  Also SOP scalar field.  Set default operation to 'set always'.

 

 

 

dops_collision_from_file.hipnc

Edited September 30, 2014 by cpb

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ok, i check Peters Vimeo channel,
Jim - you say use static object - but isnt the static obj not for static objects ? ...if the object has to go through the gas/liquid etc. the object is in motion so i do i missunderstand the term "static" ?

and

Craig, nice example, i think i will need that in later use. but what about Bullet sims? and when to use  "deforming geometry" and "object transform" ?

 

cheerz

[jim c]

As I understand it, a "static" object in DOPs doesn't mean that it can't deform. It just means that it's not going to deform as a result of the DOPs network, and that DOPs is not going to be sending data *back* to the SOP object and changing things.

So you could have an animated character whose geo is deforming from the bones rig and moving around. Then bring that into DOPs as a "static" object. Once in DOPs it can affect other DOPs objects, such as collisions, etc. Hopefully someone can correct me if I'm mistaken here. For more check these out:

 

http://vimeo.com/8275547

http://vimeo.com/8275736

http://vimeo.com/8276340