Hey all, I exported out an alembic scene from C4D, imported into Houdini, made the proper scale adjustments and everything looks as it should. However, when I go to render in Mantra, I select the imported camera in my alembic scene and the preview is completely black. When I add a Houdini camera and render the scene looks as if it should but the alembic camera will not show up in the render. Any ideas?

Thanks!

Does it look ok when you see through it in houdini?
I seem to remember that this used to be a problem but i thought it was solved by maxon i think. What versions are you using?
Mind sharing the abc file? With just the camera maybe?

-b

Thanks so much for your response!
I seem to have found a workaround at the moment but it's not exact.

I was making a mistake after I imported the alembic scene by scaling the alembic scene inside the alembic node which I think was messing up the camera.

In object level I made a null, made the alembic archive a child of the null, then scaled down the null until my alembic scene is about where it should be. I checked the camera and it looks correct and renders fine.

However, I'm wondering if there's a better way to get exactly the right conversion in scale from c4d to Houdini because for scenes where the scale has to be exactly the same the process I'm using now won't really work because it will always be slightly off.

To answer your questions about versions, I'm on C4D R16 and Houdini 14.

Thanks so much for your response!

Here's the file, btw, forgot to attach it in the last message.

- Go to the “Camera_Bake_SmoothShape” node inside the alembic hierarchy
- Be on frame 1
- Ctrl+LMB to delete the keyframe for Far Clipping Plane on the view tab, and add a 0 so you get 1000000
> Then i can see the cube and the BG_PLANE

Does that work?

-b

EDIT: Added “Far Clipping Plane on the view tab,” on line 3

As for scale, i'm using cm in c4d and set export scale in the alembic export options window to o,o1cm when saving abc. That way i don't have to do any scaling in Houdini.
A 100cm from c4d then matches a 1 unit cube in Houdini. 1 unit in Houdini is 1 meter.

-b

The 0.01cm export from C4D totally worked, thanks so much for letting me know.

As for the deleting the keyframe on the Camera_Bake_Smooth node, are you referring to the properties in the “Frame” parameter in the screenshot?

One level deeper:
/obj/alembicarchive1/Camera_Bake_Smooth/Camera_Bake_SmoothShape
Go to the view tab and then delete the keyframe on the Far Clipping channel.

-b

Ah I see, that's awesome. Thank you so much for your help, I really appreciate it!

No problem