Hi!

I've scattered some “flakes” on a dress that's animated (cloth simulation). I tried exporting an alembic file (20 frames, 95Mb), but when I import into maya, it takes a super long time (about 10 min) and the result is one geo per flake. Once loaded, it's super slow to navigate in maya.

I'm guessing alembic is not a bad way to export. The problem seams to be having one geo per flake. Any way to end up with one geo?

Thanks.

-Olivier

Maya's Alembic implementation leaves SO much to be desired. It's just bad. Not sure how to merge into one on export from Houdini, but one thing you can do in Maya is merge the geometry with history, that'll turn it into a single geo but maintain point transforms, because a lot of the slowness has to do with Maya having to traverse a huge geometry DAG list. If you're using Vray a more efficient option is converting the alembic to a vray proxy, then the geometry just loads at render

If you pack geo in Houdini and export to Maya with Alembic the result is one geo per piece.
But if you don't pack geometry it results in one combined geo in Maya. It's much lighter both to export from Houdini and to import in Maya.

Ahh! Thanks Madrenderman. I didn't know about that. That sounds good.

Thanks AndyW. I'm using redshift. If saving a proxy from it works nicely, I'll go that way.

-Olivier