Hi,

I have a maya character, which is applied as a crowd agent in houdini.
The object is imported into houdini through alembic with no problem, so i created a crowd sim with the object.

But the problem occurs when the crowd is imported into maya through alembic to render in arnold. I lose all the part names of the agent objects, which need for shading assignments in maya. Since all the part names got messed up, I can't reassign related shaders to them in maya.
Alembic export in houdini seems to just take its houdini hierarchy as its part names.

I am looking for a proper way to export alembic objects in houdini to keep its original part names from maya.

Any help or tips would be appreciated.

Thank you.

Ok, let's start out in a basic manner:

- Which Alembic version are you using Ogawa or HDF5?
- Which version of Houdini are you using?
- Do you work with that GPU cache thingy inside maya?

I've been through a lot of similar issues myself, lately and some of them werde due to inhouse customizations we had done to the Alembic plugins that were loaded into Maya…

Phlok
Ok, let's start out in a basic manner

- Which Alembic version are you using Ogawa or HDF5?
- Which version of Houdini are you using?
- Do you work with that GPU cache thingy inside maya?

I've been through a lot of similar issues myself, lately and some of them werde due to inhouse customizations we had done to the Alembic plugins that were loaded into Maya…

Hi,

I tried in Houdini 13 with HDF5, and I never played with GPU cache stuff in Maya.
I feel we may need to write a custom alembic node in houdini to get the part names right before exporting, but I am looking for a easier solution before we go for a harder way…..

Thanks.

I think it can be achieved in this manner:

On alembic import of your char make sure poly group names are set via the “primitive groups ” option, these groups can relate back to the maya node names of the meshes/shapes or transforms if you prefer.

Convert the group names to a primitive attribute called: “name” I think you can use the name sop to do this with the option “name from group”

When writing out the alembic in houdini 13 the alembic rop has an option partion mode, set this to use attribute value it should default to the “name” attribute but you may have to add it. The shapes/transform in maya can now inherit the value of the name attribute.

If you wish to also preserve any hierarchy data you can try using the add path attribute on the alembic sop, then using this attribute to partition with in the output rop, I've not tried this way myself and it may require some packed prim work too if you want proper transforms.

Note alembic type hdf5 or ogawa makes no differences to the export of names and whatnot its just a back end config. The current maya versions up to 2014 only come with hdf5 support but if you build the maya plugins yourself then you can use the newer ogwa back end or hdf5

Thanks for the tips, and I will try it out to see how it goes~!