Exporting Geometry With Baked Animation?

[Netvudu]

Hi everybody. First post here. I'm one of the lucky students at the brand new AT Houdini course in Spain and I'm making my best to learn this really really exciting tool, but I'm still quite new to it so please, bear with me.

Before Houdini I've been using Lightwave for about 10 years, and working with it for about 6, but I can already see the advantages on the new riggin tools at my disposal at the SideFX cool package. So, I want to rig and animate a model inside Houdini.

Because I'm so new to it I still will have to study hard in order to be able to get as much quality from my renders as I get from LW, so for the moment I would like to be able to export the baked animation into the character so that I can render from LW.

I've seen that Houdini allows exporting sequences of objs, but I have tried the "usual" solution for other packages which is exporting the animation baked into the vertices of the geometry and it feels really comfortable to work. (usually using "Point Oven"). How could I make the same thing from Houdini, this is, exporting the geometry with the baked animation?

I've been hinted to try the "Reaflow workaround", which would be exporting from houdini via the .sd format and then import it into LW. I have to try this because it could work perfectly but also wanted to know if there's another common solution for this.

Thanks for the help, and glad to be here

[michael]

the most common solution for this is to simply write out a series of .obj and inport them into the app of choice...

there is no publicaly available Point Oven style MDD OP for Houdini

[edward]

I've never looked at the MDD format. But I wonder how far one can push it by using a Geometry CHOP and then saving that data out. Possibly using Mark Story's File Out* CHOP for some output customization.

* http://www.digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/file_out/index.html

[thekenny]

I've never looked at the MDD format. But I wonder how far one can push it by using a Geometry CHOP and then saving that data out. Possibly using Mark Story's File Out* CHOP for some output customization.

* http://www.digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/file_out/index.html

27967[/snapback]

i wonder if the chop method would be faster than writing out just the points from the animation and make a VEXSOP to do the old pointSOP $TX2 $TY2 $TZ2 thing to make the existing geometry move to the animated point position. Vex is faster than the pointSOP. If the points on disk are minus all the existing groups and attributes will make the file size on disk smaller and the read/write faster.

You just have to make sure you are doing the right thing reading in the geometry from disk so your motion blur is correct.

Interestingly enough if you just do the pointSOP swap you will get motion deformation blur occuring just not the same as if you rendered it live from the deform. you need to use a sequence blend so the geometry's postion is correct between the $F and $F + shutter.

neat

-k

[Netvudu]

By now it

[SvenP]

I've never looked at the MDD format. But I wonder how far one can push it by using a Geometry CHOP and then saving that data out. Possibly using Mark Story's File Out* CHOP for some output customization.

* http://www.digitalcinemaarts.com/dev/file_out/index.html

27967[/snapback]

I dont think you can get plain Houdini to write Lightwave mdd files because mdd files are in Big-Endian byte order .

Sven