Export rig with animation from houdini

[sandzuro]

How can you export bone animation from houdini to another package/game engine effectively with working bones? I am trying to make a pipeline for exporting characters with rigs for game engines and webgl engines like goo create. If I am understand correctly there are two problems: houdini rig structure is based purely on bones, but all other application work with joint based system; the second problem: there are no possibilities to include vertex caches in a fbx file, so it just got discarded. 

Edited February 26, 2015 by sandzuro

[DaJuice]

Hi Alexander,

I've read some conflicting information regarding this topic. For example, that you can't export a regular Houdini rig because it is bone-based rather than joint based, or that you can't export animation if your character is a digital asset or inside a subnet. But for what it's worth I've had success getting a character of mine from Houdini to Unity via fbx. If you have specific questions let me know.

I am not familiar with Goo Create but in the case of Unity it expects biped rigs to follow a certain hierarchy if you want to be able to use its Mecanim animation system for retargeting and IK interaction. If you are not concerned with that you can get more complex rigs into Unity.

 

From what I understand blendshapes do not currently work because Houdini's fbx exporter doesn't support it? Maybe someone can clear that up.

-Edit- Apparently blendshapes export works for Maya but not Unity according to this post: https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&p=169694#169694

Edited March 9, 2015 by DaJuice