houdini to 3ds max

[6ril]

Hi there,

 

I'm wondering what would be, according to you, the best way to transfer a crowd animation from houdini to 3ds max ?

 

I thought I'd use the alembic format, but after a test of only 50 agents, I end up with a 30Giga file !!!

I have to mention that I'm working on a looooong shot, around 3000 frames.

 

I quite concern as the final shot should be with 1800 agents and 8000 frames !

 

Can it be managed ? I'm working on a "regular" pc (i7, GTX980, 16G ram).

 

 

Is there a better way to deal with this?

 

thanks,

 

cyril.

[6ril]

Hi,

 

I'm wondering what would be the best way to export a large crowd animation (15 000 frames) of 1500 agents (mocapbiped1) to use in 3ds max > ?

 

I've tried alembic, but, as I feared, the disk space is HUDGE ! Like no manageable.

 

Is there a smarter way ?

 

 

 

[Atom]

Just curious, how are you going to play the sim back in Max?

[carlo_c]

Hey, sorry I don't have a solution but we gave this a go at work with a much smaller dataset and came to the conclusion that it'd be best rendered out of Houdini. We gave the 3ds max Houdini Engine a shot too but with no luck.

 

You have a lot more going on in terms of frames and agents too than we tested, if you do find a solution please do let us know here!

[6ril]

Thanks for your input Carlo.

 

I was getting to the same conclusion -> render in houdini.

I made some more tests, and beside the disk space pb (crazy amount of teras), max isn't handling well big alembic or fbx, many crash.

 

So I can already tell you that I won't have a solution :/

 

The only solution I see is beyond my will and knowledge:

exporting the particles motion and the states changes somehow to max. Export in alembic only the mocapbiped clips.

Then in max, rewire those alembic clips to all particles at the right time according to the exported state changes.

Wouldn't be perfect, as it would also need some clip playback speed info, transition between clips info ...

 

 

thanks again.

Edited February 16, 2016 by 6ril

[6ril]

@atom

how ?

you mean where is the play button ?

 

playing a alembic sequence in max is no pb, the pb is the size of the sim and alembic file.

 

It's just not doable.

I will have to render in houdini.

Edited February 17, 2016 by 6ril

[michael]

isn't there a 3ds max version of the File SOP?

or a way to read a geo sequence from disk?

[6ril]

well there's several file formats doing that (read geo sequence from disk). (alembic, fbx, obj, ...)

But my pb here is how to deal with exporting very large crowd for very long animation : 15000frames of 1500 agents.

 

I've made a double threat, I'm sorry.

 

Can someone merge them, somehow ?

 

here is the other similar thread : http://forums.odforce.net/topic/25128-houdini-to-3ds-max/