Baking Houdini Agents

[up4]

Hi,

 

I was wondering if it could be possible to bake H14+ crowd system agents from another software (makehuman for instance) using HDK or else? Thanks,

 

Vincent

[edward]

Try exporting it from MakeHuman as an .fbx file. Now you should be able to import that into Houdini, animate (does makehuman do animation yet?), and then bake as agents.

[up4]

There is a rigging framework that was released today for MakeHuman, but I haven't tried it yet. I would rig/animate in Blender. But I can do all that (load BVH and other mocap sequences) and involuntary behavior loops (breathing, eyes, small movements in the face, etc.) in DAZ so I will use that package to test H14's crowd simulator. When I load a FBX (without animation) from DAZ to Houdini, I get lots of nulls to control the joints, but no IK so it's a little bit clumsy to do the animation in Houdini. I havent tried with animation from DAZ yet. Will do tomorrow. What you are saying is that if I load a FBX with the rig, the animation, the geometry, and the materials I can just create an "Agent" ROP in the "/out" and I can bake all that on disk as-is? What about if I want to load another FBX with an animation (BVH + mesh deformation in DAZ) can I just bake that in the same agent in another clip?

 

I hope I'm expressing myself correctly here. Anyways, thanks for the answer!

 

Regards,

 

Vincent

[edward]

Yes, as long as your rigs are the same (identical names and topology), then you can bake multiple clips using the same agent name. As for materials, that's more complicated because the material import isn't very well supported in general.