Importing?

I just downloaded Houdini and I am very disappointed. Where is the ability to import other files from other programs? It seems that all the high end 3D software can not import old stander file formats, like DXF or newer ones like cr2. Houdini will end up like Maya?fs learning edition, erased off my hard drive to make room for Poser and Vue d?fesprit files.

Dale

file formats [odforce.net]

note obj, dxf, lw

use the file SOP for importing

Ohh. I get now, I have to put in the extension I want and guess if it will import the file. Do I seem that I have an attitude? Well I do. In the last year I have work with the free stuff Blender and Alice. Cheap, Bryce Vue and Poser. And the learning edition of Maya and now Houdini. Any software waste my time on something simple leaves me with an attitude.

Dale

Do you see the advantages to having a File SOP to import geometry?

It is used quite frequently to import sequences of geometry from other packages or from houdini itself. You simply use the Houdini global variable for current frame $F in the file name. To bring in padded images with four decimal places, use $F4.

Example: Bring in a sequence of geos labelled my_geos_0001.obj to my_geos_0300.obj, you would type in the File SOP /<path_to_geos>/my_geos_$F4.0obj where <path_to_geos> would be the physical path to those files. Playing forward will fetch each geo in turn.

Welcome to Houdini.

Heres a way of thinking about it -using the FileSOP keeps the importing of the geometry procedural. For other packages, you import geometry once and only once and you're stuck with it baked into your scene. Unless you “lock” the SOP (which baked the result into your hipfile), the FileSOP will reimport geometry whenever it needs to.

This makes it incredibly useful for animated sequences of geometry.

I'm sorry, Houdini is not going to help your quest for immediate boxed results. It's a professional package for lateral thinking artists.

Give it some time.

Better steer well clear of Apple Mac's, you be in all sorts of trouble they don't use extensions for anything….. :roll:

The more one pays for a software the more one expects out of it. The ability to import an object with all its bones. Have it come in the 3d world at 0,0,0, move it and add it to a layer. Then to hide the layer is too much to ask? The ability to scene import from Bryce or Vue might make me think about paying the steep asking price.

Dale

do any of the major apps (xsi, maya, 3dsmax, lightwave) import scenes from bryce or vue? i doubt it. they might import the geometry but not the scene files. the problem you describe is common to all apps.

there is no layer, as you would know it from other apps, in houdini.

you should watch some of the video tutorials [sidefx.vislab.usyd.edu.au] before writing it off saying it cant do what you want.

or not.

I guess it all depends what you expect for paying more. I expect the more I pay the less likely I am to need things like Byrce or Vue. Houdini's job isn't to support all these little packages it has it's own solutions and is completely customizable to do any job. That's what I expect for paying more.

A layer is just a different object in Houdini. It is easy to grab multiple objects and turn them on/off with the click of the blue tab.

Plus “Layer” rendering as done in Maya or other packages doesn't compare to Houdini's capabilities in this regard (especially when adding Deep Rasters into the mix).

Don't expect it to work like Package “X”. It doesn't. It is different and far more flexible and more powerful. It takes a little learning, but big complex things come into your grasp that are unimaginable in other packages. I can do a crowd of people/animals/whatever in a day that would take weeks in Maya and be way more modifiable and reusable at any point.

If you want to do the same things in the same way as other packages, then Houdini probably isn't for you.

-Craig

>Ohh. I get now, I have to put in the extension I want and guess if it will import the file. Do I seem that I have an attitude? Well I do. In the last year I have work with the free stuff Blender and Alice. Cheap, Bryce Vue and Poser. And the learning edition of Maya and now Houdini. Any software waste my time on something simple leaves me with an attitude.
——————————————————

Sounds like you're not ready to play with the big boys yet. If you can't spend some time and have some patience using the applications we all have spent time and patience learning that's your own shortcoming. Knowing “Poser” wont get you a good job anywhere, as far as I know. That would be like going into a job interview and bragging about learning how to play “The Sims.” Nobody will be impressed. However, Houdini gives you the flexibility and the pipeline to create YOUR OWN version of Poser, if you know what you're doing.

There are two schools of thought: 1.) instant gratification 2.) delayed gratification. In Houdini most of what you do will require extreme patience, and gratification will be delayed. Thats why we're working on films and getting paid well, and you're off downloading app's wherever you are. Patience brings reward.

Let me tell you from experience. You get what you pay for. That also applies to time. You spend more time, you'll get more of a reward at the end of it. Anybody can make pretty pictures in Bryce and Poser. ANYBODY. More than likely, your work in Poser or Bryce will look very similar to everybody elses. And where does that get you?

High end packages give you the ability to create your own custom effects and systems but require some serious personal investment.

It's your choice, but coming from experience it sounds like you're going down the wrong road.

Want instant gratification without putting in the effort? Maybe you should be a producer instead…. nothing against producers 8)

my main thought in transfering from maya to houdini for now is that it requires another way of thinking, and if you are not ready you are not…
that is not meant to be some sort of snoberry but I tried to learn it two times before and didnt but now after ap.2 years
i fell like it is made for me!

I started off using a very simple program called Caligari Truespace and ended up getting a job at a facility that was using Prisms. My first day of work was miserable. I came home thinking to myself, “If this is what being a professional cg artist requires I'm not sure I want to be doing this.” Within four grueling weeks, I'd adapted quite a bit. I was still in shock as to how incredibly complicated everything seemed, but week after week I began to see the power and flexibility of the package.

I guess after going through all that, it's frusterating to see new artists who want immediate results without investing the time to understand the underlying process, to see all the behind the scenes work.

I'm still learning a lot day by day. The most important thing I've learned is when you start to become a powerful Houdini user, other programs like Maya or XSI become much easier to use. You'll find yourself frusterated and actually missing Houdini's logic and structure and incredible procedural power.

Instead of coming into the forum with a bad attitude, and evoking negative responses from people like myself :twisted: try describing exactly what it is you are trying to do and maybe we can help point you in the right direction.
:?:

well, I hoped to get some information out of that promissing thread title,..well, anyway,..Im just starting with apprentice and havent done much reading yet..my bad, ok, but as this thread is allready here, we might as well turn it into something more informative for future lecturers.

I clicked this thread to see if I could get following information:

Q 1: Ive a libary of .obj, .3ds, .mb..normally turned into .off or.obj-
now, when I need x or y , I just go looking for it in my libary, instead of modelling every screw over and over again.
now, Im not talking the apprentice version, as I dont expect to be able to im/export objects…no learning versions out there can…

in an earlier post I read that this can be solved with the comandline in the sop…am I right here? havent tried it yet..should have , before double asking. but could I actually import geometry/meshes into the apprentce version that way?..wow

now, its not the first time , for me that I have decided to learn houdini, but the first time a couple of month ago lasted about an hour(incl. the unix install)
I closed the program and closed it for good (version6.1)..
all right while Im at it: whats a native houdini file? ops: .hip is the apprentice versions file extention and the native/commercial one?

so, the answer is :

current frame $F in the file name. To bring in padded images with four decimal places, use $F4.

Example: Bring in a sequence of geos labelled my_geos_0001.obj to my_geos_0300.obj, you would type in the File SOP /<path_to_geos>/my_geos_$F4.0obj where <path_to_geos> would be the physical path to those files. Playing forward will fetch each geo in turn.

the learning curve is quite intimidating :roll: at first climpse, but hey…learning is allways good !

btw. expect more noob Qs from me soon!!
btw.II : before I google, are there any good books out for houdini-learning. I allways prefer printed guides

hi… yes you can import geometry with a file sop, to export geometry right click the final node in the chain (or any node really) and right -click->save as.. yes it works in the apprentice version, dont you love sesi.

hip (scenes) and pic (images) are the real houdini formats, hipnc (nc means non-commercial) and picnc are the apprentice versions. the advantage of using picnc is that the watermark is only added when you save an image to other than picnc (i.e. jpg), so you can composite etc without overlapping watermarks and just export a final image in whatever format.

houdini apprentice is minimally restricted which makes it usable without pain. feel free to ask questions. there are no books

A job and play with the big boys? Why would I want to do that? I?fm happy with the instant gratification of cheap software that doesn?ft have the learning curve of a cliff.

How similar is playing the SIM?fs and 3D animation?

Make characters.
Make 3d models with bones.

Move into pre-made home or make new one yourself.
Move into environment that someone else made or make your own.

Set parameters on what the character will do.
Set parameters on what the 3d model will do.

Move camera to watch action.
Set camera to record action.

Watch characters do what ever they want to do.
Wait for rendering farm to show you that your 3d models did not do as you expected.

Relax; after all it?fs only a game.
Race like a madman to fix, the dead line was yesterday.

My best friend?fs eight year old daughter is hooked on the Sims. She gets those characters doing all sort of things. When she grows up, you all might be out of a job.

I wrote a book, it not the greatest book but is my best effort. If it wasn?ft for MS word and the spelling and grammar correction, I wouldn?ft have finished it. MS word will open and work with a lot of different documents. Why?
I have several different image programs on my computers. They all open way more than four or five types of image files. Why?

Poser will import and export more different types of files than Houdini. Houdini can to be made to work with any file, all it takes is some knowledge of the file that you are trying to import and you can write an importer. Poser is written in python. I could write an importer for a Houdini file. It would take me at least 3 months to a year. My programming skills are not that good. But it would take as much time or even more for the Houdini importer.

My current gold is to finish a feature film by the end of September next year. Will it be Pixar quality?
Probity not. Can I do it? Yes, with 12 computers I think I can. Will I use Houdini? As it stands right now, no.


Dale

Hi dueyftw, are you having any specific problems using Houdini? It will not import cr2 files, but it will import dxf, amongst other formats.

As far as your SIMs/CG analogy, I would think that advanced users will always prefer more control over simple-to-use. In some respects Houdini sacrifices user-friendlyness in favor of more flexibility/control. It sounds to me like you are looking for a program that works like Poser or Vue d?fesprit but covers all of 3d content creation, not just characters or landscapes. Well, as far as I know such a program doesn't exist. Sorry. If that is indeed your idea of the perfect 3d app, then I'd recommend you run as fast and far away from Houdini as you can, because it's pretty much at the other end of the spectrum. A lot of power and control, but no hand-holding.

Houdini supports many formats - just type
For image formats, type: “iconvert”
For geometry formats, type, try looking at the Wiki.

http://www.odforce.net/wiki/index.php/FileFormats [odforce.net]

..

If you're trying to produce a feature film of nearly 2000 shots rendered at 2k by yourself in a year, then you are going never going to get better than blocking style animation with huge help from stock libararies of animation thrown together in a program like MotionBuilder and rendered in OpenGL or incredibly simplistically by a software renderer. Use a program geared for animation remapping and has a library of clips. Something built and streamlined for Previs.

I downloaded each program you talked about to make sure I wasnt just being a total jerk. Poser is actually really cool and I get a lot of fun out of it. I love the sketch render option and its great for storyboarding things out, especially for those of us who are used to hand-drawing storyboards like I used to. Poser is great for that stuff. But Alice? Oh man… yikes. That software was a joke. It was good for a laugh though, I'll have to admit.

Blender was decent and I like the attitude of the guys building it. If you want to use a program with advanced features though it isnt for you. I'd say it's about 5-10 years behind. Still, a nice start and a good idea.

Bryce? Look up the images online and you'll instantly see it cannot produce photo-real results. I began playing with it and found it to be quite lame, atleast in the trial mode. Pretty much everything I wanted to add had to be brought in from a “library.” Alsi it was incredibly slow on my machine at home, which runs Houdini very well.

Sorry, I like to build my things from scratch and have complete control over every aspect of what I'm expected to deliver as a final shot. It can get amazingly complex at times and confusing as hell but still, in a production environment I need that fine control.

Making a movie on your own should be commended no matter what software you're using. I'd seriously look into 3D Max…… it's the one software that is easy to use and produces pretty fantastic results. Look at all the work that comes out of Blizzard studios. Their turnaround time is very fast and the results may not be film quality but they're damn pretty.

Good luck with your project and sorry Houdini isnt for you. I can guarantee if you end up not being able to do something you want to do in some of those other packages, you can do it in Houdini. Thats why we swear by it in production. We're asked all the time to do things that havent necessarely been done before, so for us using presets just isnt an option really.

Good luck.

Thanks for the support. Sorry you don?ft like Bryce. With a little effort you can make some real nice landscapes. Vue from E-on software does the same thing but I think that Bryce has a better rendering quality. Other than that I share you opinions about the other software.

My current pipeline is to write script, (done). Record the actors. Mimic, Poser then render in Vue. The truth is Vue is ok but unlike Bryce it will import Poser files. If Houdini could import my Poser files I would drop Vue in a hart beat and pay the price for a license. I think also that a lot of software likes to pigeonhole you into using their products by limiting types of file formats that the program will import or export. Blender is as you say 5 or 10 years old and free, only imports and exports a few file formats. So I don?ft expect much from it. Houdini is competing with top of the line software like Maya and Lightwave.

My last post on this subject. I will try to post back when I?fm done with my project.

Bye

Dale