Hi guys,
I'm working on a project currently and have run into a bit of an issue.
Heres an example of the issue that I'm having.
I'm exporting a character to Houdini via alembic from Maya. In Maya the normals look fine, but when imported to Houdini the whole thing falls apart.
The character is very reflective as well and this flickering of the normals is very apparent.
I've put a normals node down but that still jitters frame to frame.
Below are a few examples: Houdini, Maya and a rendered sequence.
Any solutions to this?
Maya to Houdini alembic workflow, normals are wrong?
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- Dedrich
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- jsmack
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- Dedrich
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jsmack
That's strange, it looks like the points are jittering around and the model is exported without Normals-and Houdini is creating Normals based on these unstable points.
When unpacking in SOPs, do you see a normal attribute? Is the model very far away from the origin?
Nice Warlords T17 btw.
We're currently in the process of moving things closer to the origin, right now in Maya the character is:
x: -171027.213
y: 3041.937
z: 83723.621
Which is insane and we're fixing that right now (we also found out that it really screws up our redshift proxy exports).
Even with moving the character back to the origin though the issue still persists, not as bad, but still there.
See the video attached, the yellowish one was placed back at the origin.
There is also a @N attribute present but it still doesn't look right.
See the video attached for the rendered version, its not as noticeable with all the subdivision but around the belt crystal area there is a lot of jittering.
Edited by Dedrich - Feb. 24, 2021 14:24:56
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- jsmack
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The normals look like Houdini-auto generated ones, which set the hard edge normals based on angle. A deforming mesh has changing angles, hence the popping hard edges. Are you sure the alembic is exported from maya with normals? I'm not an expert on exporting from Maya, but when I import alembics from Maya, some shapes have defined normals and some don't, so it must be something that can be controlled.
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- Dedrich
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jsmack
The normals look like Houdini-auto generated ones, which set the hard edge normals based on angle. A deforming mesh has changing angles, hence the popping hard edges. Are you sure the alembic is exported from maya with normals? I'm not an expert on exporting from Maya, but when I import alembics from Maya, some shapes have defined normals and some don't, so it must be something that can be controlled.
These are the only options that I can find, see attached.
There is an @N attribute once I drop a convert node in Houdini. But...somethings not right :\
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- lewis_T
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- Dedrich
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tinyhawkus
When you say moving the character back to origin, are you talking pre-export from Maya?
If it's way out in space on export it's going to generate jittering points.
Are the Normals locked in Maya?
L
Moving the character rig back to the origin in Maya then exporting seemed to fix most issues, not sure if the normals are locked however.
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