C4D-Houdini Pipeline - Has anybody got any experience?

[rodpacker]

Hi guys,

for a current project I am getting a C4D scene (a basic font, a basic camera animation (hand animated;not along a spline), a basic three light setup) and I will have to chuck in some effects using Houdini so I am trying to get the scene into Houdini somehow.

I haven't had any success using FBX so far (due to the scene setup as well as the missing rescale option in the fbx importer).

I have had some success using Collada.

However, unfortunately lights don't come across perfectly, which I, looking at the different app setup, expected to happen. That one is a doable fix though.

The more important bit is the camera that also doesn't port over properly. It seems like the position animation comes across just fine, BUT neither focal length, aperture, resolution, ... come across. Manually typing in the values gets me VERY close but still a tiny bit off, so before I waste another couple days readjusting each parameter trying to match two renders, I was wondering if anybody here has done something similar before and could point me into the right direction.

Help - as always - highly appreciated

cheers

rodpacker

[Dennis]

Hi rodpacker,

we've been using a pipeline with C4D and Houdini for our last project.

To get animated geometry from C4D to Houdini we mainly used the "Riptide" plugin for C4D to export obj sequences.

For the camera we also used collada and had to type in the parameters manually. However, as far as I remember we always had a perfect match. How much exactly is your "tiny bit off"???

Greetings,

Dennis

[rodpacker]

Hi Dennis,

THANKS A LOT FOR THE TIP WITH RIPTIDE!!!! That one is worth gold. Been looking for an obj sequence exporter for C4D for ages without success.

As for the camera I got it working by now after playing around for another while.

The camera in my scene is swinging around a lookAt object quite randomly and with the extreme-ish fisheye used (12mm) every minimalistic discrepancy sticks out as if it was a massive error. Funnily enough while exporting via collada doesn't take any of the camera settings along, FBX does take those settings along. Strange thing is that e.g. 12.640mm in C4D is converted to 12.6037mm.

However I ended up playing around with the collada version and manual entry and got it to work.

Thanks a lot again

cheers

Rodpacker

Edited September 5, 2009 by rodpacker