So I am planning an effect, and I am hoping that you call can give me a hand in pointing out some gotchas before I come across them.

I need to a glass break shot. Now this is not a dynamic shatter shot as the lok has to be set with the director. So what I have done is had one of my guys paint up a style frame of the glass one frame before the break happens (glass is being shot by bullets, and there are multiple holes before the glass shatters). We have also painted the way the remaining glass is to look in the frame after the break.

My plan was since we are going to finish the shot for rendering in Maya, since that is what my lighter knows the best. We were going to model the scene in Maya and do the fracture the old way, by hand as the director was very specific on the look. We will do poly cuts or draw out the cut peices in illustratior and then bring them into my for extrusion. Just to give the glass some thickness.
Then my plan was to get that into houdini, either by FBX or Collada or something we write with pymel to have DOP's do the sim.
Now I am still very new to DOP's but think this should work just fine, I am not sure how the best way to deal with all the geo will be with all the RBD objects and things like that. Any Thoughts?

But my plan was to pull that geo in, maybe use the Shatter SOP to break up some of the smaller sections where the bullets penetrated the glass, but to do the actual fall of glass here. Since DOP's is a much better solver than Maya Dynamics.

I would then bake that sim out and get it back to Maya (FBX?) for the final lighting before it would go to comp.

Has anyone been down this path before that can provide any suggestions on things to do, and not do? Any maya houdini translation issues etc? I do not have a lot of time to pull this off. In theory this all should work, but the technical gotcha's are where I am worried I will lose the time.

Thank you for all the help!

With just the geo to write out I would just use a file dop in the sim to write out sequential obj's for import into Maya.

Probably just write out an obj out of Maya as well for the glass break model to import into Houdini. Just check your normals and cusp angle(soft or hard edges in Maya) - look at the facet sop. You might need to use both a connectivity sop and a partition sop to bring the geo into dops.

There is a great tool on the Peter Cleas dvd at Buzz3d that has a really good shatter tool where you can set point or multiple points of impact that produces pretty decent results.

jball
I would then bake that sim out and get it back to Maya (FBX?) for the final lighting before it would go to comp.

Has anyone been down this path before that can provide any suggestions on things to do, and not do? Any maya houdini translation issues etc? I do not have a lot of time to pull this off. In theory this all should work, but the technical gotcha's are where I am worried I will lose the time.

Thank you for all the help!

I've done that before quite a few versions ago and ran into swimming points issue, as it's brought in as a point cache. The only way I was able to get it working right was to write a chan importer in maya to batch import a bunch of objs and chan files and you'd end up with a bunch of pieces with keyframe animation set to them.