Hello,

I am fairly new to Houdini and am exploring its use to visualize some computational fluid dynamics simulations I perform. I have tried to find the formatting required to write .bgeo to be read in Houdini Apprentice 15.5.523, however I have not been able to find it. I have successfully written .geo (in ASCII), which leaves me to believe there is something I am not understanding about the .bgeo format, such as required offsets in the binary file.

Does anyone have experience writing a .bgeo from an external application that would be willing to provide an example? I think a small example with the header and a couple of points would be sufficient for me to figure out the rest.

Thank you

I think it is a closed proprietary file format.

rchiodi
Hello,

I am fairly new to Houdini and am exploring its use to visualize some computational fluid dynamics simulations I perform. I have tried to find the formatting required to write .bgeo to be read in Houdini Apprentice 15.5.523, however I have not been able to find it. I have successfully written .geo (in ASCII), which leaves me to believe there is something I am not understanding about the .bgeo format, such as required offsets in the binary file.

Does anyone have experience writing a .bgeo from an external application that would be willing to provide an example? I think a small example with the header and a couple of points would be sufficient for me to figure out the rest.

Thank you

.geo files are stored in JSON. .bgeo are a binary encoding of JSON which you can access in the HDK using UT_JSONWriter/UT_JSONParser. We also provide a reference implementation of the binary JSON in $HH/public/binary_json.

There's also a Python module (hjson) which read/writes ASCII or Binary JSON (it uses UT_JSON*).

If you are ok to incur a license hit, you can use GU_Detail::save/load().

Thank you, that was a very helpful reply. I have settled on taking an easier route (although much less efficient) route and am writing out .geo files from a fortran90 program I wrote, and then use python scripts in Houdini to convert them all to .bgeo. If I start running large enough cases where performance does become a major issue, I will certainly look into the functions and modules you mentioned.

Thanks again