Hi,

In maya i have a large pile of hires textured books. What I want is to simulate the books in houdini and bring the result back into maya what means translation and rotation to be able to transfer the simulation back to the original books. So what's the best workflow?

As much as I know I cannot export hierarchies to houdini via houdini engine, is that correct? So my only possiblity is to merge all the books, simulate them and bring them back into maya and extract the necessary data somehow from the simulation result. This sounds a bit complicated to me, is there a simpler way?

Sorry for the late reply. It took me a while to try out a setup.

I don't think there's a straightforward way to do it at the moment. However, you could achieve something close with a bit of work. As you said, you'd need to merge all the geometries into one mesh, and use it as an input to the asset. To extract the transformation, you can extract the DOP objects as points. Then, you can use Maya's particle instancer to apply the transformation from each point to the original geometries. The trick is to convert the transformations from the points into something that the Maya particle instancer can use.

Take a look at the attached asset and Maya file.

Thanks for the answer, I'll try it.