Packed Primitives to Maya - Best Practices

[ParticleSkull]

Hey guys, I have a scene with one object copied into thousands of points (particles).  Since I'm using packed primitives, the scene gets super fast on Houdini but it's impossible to export it out. 

Does anyone knows what would be the best way to send it to Maya? 

Is there a way to, maybe, export it as a placeholder (a box for example) and, inside of maya, replace the box with the original object, maintaining it's matrix (pos, rotation, scale..)?

Thx,
Alvaro

Edited April 10, 2017 by ParticleSkull

[LaidlawFX]

You can use alembic into Maya, or use Houdini engine with and HDA that is just a wrapper on the instance node with your point cloud inside there. It will use Maya instances with having to do a lot of the conversion tricks.

[ParticleSkull]

Unfortunatelly alembic or fbx files get incredibly huge. The viewport freezes even when I export only one frame. 

Houdini Engine is not an option because I'm working with these guys from another studio and they don't have Houdini out there. 

Thx though

[LaidlawFX]

I can understand this being an issue with FBX do to it's file structure, but Alembic should not have this problem. The file size may be huge, but it should work no problem even on older systems. I would wager a guess there is something pretty bad with your scene to cause this issue. Maybe double stacking of polygons, or excess attributes you are saving out. I've saved out fourty gigabyte simulations in alembic of major destruction events, and the animator can work fine in Maya with these in the background.  If you save the geo out as packed geo it should be pretty small, too. 

Edited April 10, 2017 by LaidlawFX
Adding saving as packed.

[ParticleSkull]

Good to know, I'll have a look at this. 

Even though, it would be awesome to be able to export smaller files with placeholders that could be replaced by any other object in maya. It's not easy to keep uploading these huge files

Edited April 11, 2017 by ParticleSkull

[Gavin]

Maya is notoriously bad at handling high object count scenes, so if you're going to be sending it thousands of separate objects you have to make sure maya is happy with what you're handing it. The file format and size are actually less important than making sure that maya doesn't have to try and load each piece in and treat it as a separate object. As Ben has mentioned this can be achieved by making sure to pack the geo in the proper way so that it comes into Maya under a single shape node. I say the proper way because the different alembic packing and export options will affect how maya interprets and breaks apart what you give it.

[haggi]

I have some something similiar some time ago. I exported a standin geometry from houdini and in maya I created an insance for every node with a simple script. The visibility of the original object was set to 0, worked quite well, even if you have to do it every time if you import the abc file again.

[ParticleSkull]

Alright, thank you guys.

Haggi, the guy who's working with did it just like you said, with a simples script

[5DNick]

On 4/11/2017 at 6:06 AM, Gavin said:

Maya is notoriously bad at handling high object count scenes, so if you're going to be sending it thousands of separate objects you have to make sure maya is happy with what you're handing it. The file format and size are actually less important than making sure that maya doesn't have to try and load each piece in and treat it as a separate object. As Ben has mentioned this can be achieved by making sure to pack the geo in the proper way so that it comes into Maya under a single shape node. I say the proper way because the different alembic packing and export options will affect how maya interprets and breaks apart what you give it.

What is a rough number here? Obviously there are no magic numbers but on an order of 1,000? 1,000,000? Where does it start having issues?

Currently exporting an .fbx of a complex RBD scene (from Houdini obvs) for my boss to fiddle with the animation in Maya.