Dear all,

Does it make to export millions of Houdini generated particles into Softimage and let them be rendered with Mental Ray?

Or, once the simulation is done in Houdini, is it meant to be rendered in Houidni environment, because there is no other package capable of rendering such big ammounts of particles?

If I can bring pacticles from Houdini 12 to Softimage 2012+, what will be the most appropriate fileformat?

Hey Bunkai, I recently ran into this, which may be useful for what you are looking for:

http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/partio.html [disneyanimation.com]

it is an SDK for allowing point cloud file conversion in between packages. Perhaps this would help?

Hi,
Alembic could be a solid solution to exchange Particle Systems and geometry data.

Houdini has build-in support for alembic and for Softimage there is a commercial plugin availble:

http://exocortex.com/alembic/alembic_for_softimage [exocortex.com]