Hi guys,

we are currently working on cache transfer from Houdini to 3DS Max, using Houdinis own Alembic Exporter as well as the Exocortec Crate for 3DS Max.
Geometry and Animation work fine, but we also need to import Material IDs to 3DS Max, which does not work as expected.
Exocortex' Crate uses the Alembic attribute “faceset” to identify Material IDs. So in theory, I only need to export facesets from Houdini and should be fine. But unfortunatelly, Houdini doesn't export those when I assign primitive attributes to a simple polygon mesh cube. That can easily be checked because even though .abc-files are binary, they contain some important information as strings (i.e. the tag “faceset”).
The attributes themselves are set correctly, and reimporting to Houdini works as expected.
I also checked the HDK, the proper faceset methods seem to be there(but we are having kind of a time issue, so there is not enough time to understand the whole process of how Houdini handles or write a custom exporter).

So is there a way to make Houdini export the Alembic faceset attribute?

Thanks a lot!

make a detail attribute…pretty sure that will work
and I think it might need to be prefixed with ABC_
so you could try ABC_faceset

Thanks for the quick reply…but that doesn't help it. Isn't a detail attribute per object only - which makes it impossible to assign different values to different faces anyway?

ah…
yeah sorry…skipped over the per face part… :?

I've been trying the same thing the other way round. I seem to be unable to import facesets from crate created alembic files? I see the path of what would be a faceset in the “Object Path” list but it still brings in the whole geo without selection.

Any suggestions?

Fabian

Hi guys,

I am testing exactly the same thing between Alembic and Max right now, and although alembic is already able to export groups as facesets and import the facesets from max as groups correctly, we are having a problem since when the object is exported out from max, processed in houdini and returned to max..
the original material Ids have a different number. The groups are the same, but the original numbers are lost and reset randomly. We are working with material Ids per face.

Anybody run into the same problem?
We are already talking to the exocortex guys but when I saw this thread thought I might as well ask here