Houdini 17.5 .obj export

[k00l]

Hi, a total beginner with a newbie question here.

What I did successfully:

1. I had imported a relatively simple piece of geometry in to Houdini.
2. I made 40 copies of that object
3. I created a dopnet in the same geometry node and ran a bullet simulation (I made a fancy pile of coins basically)
4. I created a filecache for the last frame of the sim, since that is all I need (and want to export)
5. I exported the frame as .abc and .fbx, however it is a single piece of geo, and more importantly, the mat ID's are all wrong
6. I created a separate geometry node, imported the cached frame as a file, and tried exporting that as an .obj. I get a 25kb file and this error message "Save failed: No such file or directory"

What I want to do but can't:

I want to export the coins, preferably as separate objects if possible. If they could be instances, that would work beyond great, however I do not think that is possible. If all else fails, I just want to preserve the mat ID's (or smoothing groups) from the original file.


I am banging my head against the wall here, any help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[Whatsinaname]

Although you could export each of them as a single object, I'd strongly advise against doing so. Apart from that, exporting an OBJ sequence would probably destroy any velocity data etc, so you might want to stick with Alembic.

Alembic can be a bit of a pain when it comes to transporting data into your desired target application (maybe it would be easier if we knew what that is). However, it allows you to write attributes to your points and there are numerous ways to read these attributes in your target application.