Maya <-> Houdini particle transfer with Alembic ?

[Manu]

Hi guys

I am making some research on the best and easiest way to transfer Maya particle (Old dynamics + nDynamics) to Houdini and vice versa.
Would you advise me to use Alembic or Partio to achieve this. What will ask for the less effort in terms of coding ? Cause unlike most of
you here i'm not a coder and i'm lazy ... :)

Thanks for your advise !

Cheers

Emmanuel

[Ben Houston]

Exocortex Crate (our Alembic implementation) supports loading and
saving particles in Maya and if you run into any issues just share a
file with us (email me at b...@exocortex.com) and we can ensure that it
works.

http://exocortex.com/alembic/get_alembic

-ben

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Best regards,
Ben Houston
CTO, Exocortex Technologies, Inc.
http://www.exocortex.com

[Andrew Lyons]

For maya data, partio will work. Only supports old style (pre-H12) bgeos last time I checked. Ask the devs to add support for H12 to get that ball rolling...

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Andrew D Lyons | Digital Artist | http://www.linkedin.com/in/tstex
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[Emmanuel Mouillet]

Thanks for your answers guys ! :)

Ben >
Do you plan to support Houdini in the futur ? cause Exocortex looks really cool.

tstex >
So basically partio will work ! I just need to compile each Partio tool and i will be able to convert my .pdc<->.bgeo in command line in a shell ?
We have a good R&D guy in my company do you know where i can find the new specs of the .bgeo of H12 maybe he would be able to do it ?

Thanks again for your help !

Cheers

Emmanuel

[Emmanuel Mouillet]

well i think i've answer my own question

the new bgeo specs are here
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/hdk12.0/hdk_ga_using.html#HDK_GA_FileFormat

it is possible to convert new bgeo to old one using gconvert

and it also look that a disney guy is already at work to make the translation directly !
https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups=#!topic/partio-discuss/KQ1lGFNu-Cs

cheers

E

ps : sorry for posting partio stuff on the Alembic group

[katrin]

hi,
Maya to Houdini works nicely for us but reimporting particles in maya looks weird.
Is there anything one has to watch doing this?
Thanks,
katrin

[Francois Chardavoine]

"looks weird" may cover a lot of things, but I suspect the first thing you're running into is that AbcImport doesn't support reading animated particles back into maya. We struggled for a while with it (with Autodesk's help), but in the end it just wasn't possible with the existing classic particle APIs. There are solutions with nParticles, but those haven't been implemented yet.

So right now reading particles back into maya from alembic is useful for something static like survey data, but not if any kind of animation is required.

Francois.

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[Ben Houston]

Exocortex Crate supports reading animated particles back into Maya and
it already works great with stuff exported from Houdini (and
Softimage.) :-) And we
give out 30 day trials of our software.
-ben

[katrin]

OK, fine we stop trying ;)