Just starting to explore Maya to Houdini (12.5) export/import with Alembic. Everything is quite fine, I managed to import an animated character in Houdini, but I can't figure out how to work then with Alembic files. For exemple, I tried to isooffset my Alembic geometry but everything I get is..nothing. I'm surely doing something wrong, is there a way to do that kind of things, standard procedures to use working with Alembic ?
I know tose are just basic tests, but any help would be greatly appreciated.
I find that on my Alembic Archive object node I have to set the “Load As” parameter to “Load Houdini Geometry”. I then object merge the geo node, which gets created inside the archive node, into my own geo node and apply a standard convert node to it. After this the geometry works fine for me with things like isooffset.
Thanks a lot Tony, tha'ts exactly what I was looking for ! Everything is working perfectly fine now.
An additional question could be : how would you work with, let's say, 25 objects in your Alembic Archive ? Would you do an object merge for each geo node in the Alembic Archive ?
It depends what I wanted to do with them. If, for example, they were an entire character split into it's component pieces and I just wanted to use that character for a collision object in a sim (so I need everything, but don't overly care about changing specific pieces), I'd probably just put something like this into my object merge:
/obj/alembicarchive*/*/*
This would bring in all of the geo nodes inside all of my alembic archives. I'd then tag on a convert node and carry on as normal.
If I wanted to do different things to specific pieces of the character though I'd probably bring them in seperately, apply a convert node, do whatever I needed to do to them and merge everything again afterwards.
Hi! I was having trouble with importing alembics into houdini as well. Such a helpful post! I was wondering, any of you guys know how to make source particles work properly on a moving alembic file?
