Hello,
I must admit I'm very new to Houdini, but this program is fascinating.
As I use Cinema 4D for years, and more familiar with C4D key framing, curves and so on...
I would like to animate little cubes on C4D, export the animation (in FBX ... or ALEMBIC)
And import this into HOUDINI.

The final idea is to make color cubic metaballs, with individual colors (each meatball cube has its own color and they join and mix).

It's nearly possible with C4D but not as beautiful as Houdini does it.
C4D consider one meatball system has one texture, and you have to trick to give each ball a color.
Not Houdini !

Anyway... I saw that when I import an FBX animated object (via FILE / IMPORT) into HOUDINI, I can see the baked keyframes...
So my idea was to copy or retarget these ones onto different HOUDINI metaballs to make them move... to drive them.
C4D ANIMATED CUBE_1 would drive HOUDINI METABALL_1
C4D ANIMATED CUBE_2 would drive HOUDINI METABALL_2
etc...
I watched so many tutorials and intros to HOUDINI lessons... but I still can't figure out how to do that... or maybe it should be done another way.

I know I should try and start to animate the metaballs with Houdini's own keyframing system...
But in a way I would really like to learn some of its features and achieve this :
driving HOUDINI objects with animated FBX imported objects.

Let me know if I definitively wrong or If you can give me a bit of tips there.
Thanks a lot by advance !!

cheers

Easier if you post some example abc with your animated cubes

Maybe u can export a set of points with pscale ?

Thank to both of you for taking time to answer.
I tried different things and here is where I am:

To sum up : I would like to drive each HOUDINI METABALLS with pre-animated objects.
And those pre-animated objects would be animated in C4D.

So at this moment, I succeeded to do this:

- I animated 5 gizmo cubes in C4D.
- I exported in FBX format
- I import this FBX into HOUDINI (FILE / IMPORT) so I can copy/paste all keyframes of each gizmo cube onto the corresponding METABALL.

So far, I get what I want. Each Houdini metaball moves accordingly with the original C4D animation, it's just a hand made copy/paste of keyframes in the ANIMATION EDITOR.

But I would have preferred to find out how to make something more automatic, like:

- just import the FBX
- make a bit of assignments (or a good naming) and then C4D_CUBE_01 would drive HOUDINI_METABALL_01, C4D_CUBE_02 would drive HOUDINI_METABALL_02... and so on.

I quickly made an FBX export file from C4D, and a Metaball scene on HOUDINI, see files attached.

Thanks for everything.

Cheers.