Easiest Way To Write Geometry To A File

[vfx-ger]

I have a hscript that writes some geometry and its attributes out to a XML(ish) file but its really slow so I was wondering what's the simplest way to do this using the HDK. Is it to create a my own output driver or is there a simpler way? I'm a complete noob when it comes to the HDK.

Edited August 18, 2007 by vfx-ger

[TheUsualAlex]

Have you looked into H9's SOHO (Python) for this? It might be exactly what you're looking for...

[vfx-ger]

Sounds cool but I'm using Houdini 8.2.

[edward]

The easiest way is probably to write an output driver. You could also write your own geometry converter but you'll need to build it as a standalone HDK utility (which means full license checkout).

[Mcronin]

The easiest way is probably to write an output driver. You could also write your own geometry converter but you'll need to build it as a standalone HDK utility (which means full license checkout).

I tried writing an output driver in older versions of Houdini, and it proved extremely difficult for me given my lack of understanding of the HDK, and I never finished it.

What I ended up doing was writing all my geometry out to geos, then writing a standalone converter for the geo format. Doing it this way you can avoid using the HDK all together. It was suprisingly easy to do. I wrote one version in Perl, one in C++ and one in C#. The C# version was by far the easiest and probbaly the quickest version, because it has a bunch of nice methods built in for sorting and searching data, regular expressions, as well as generics which I found very useful. For the C++ version I had to rely on STL and the Boost libraries for certain things, which made things a bit more difficult. The perl version was the slowest, add to that I just don't like perl.

When you do move to 9, you can easily put something together using python and HOM. I have a working exporter that writes geoemtry and some additional scene information from Houdini directly to a couple different formats encapsulated in an HDA for Houdini 9. It was really easy to create and it's very fast.