Hi there,

A friend and I are currently working on a mini project that involves a dancing character on a rainbow with some fx. After the animation was done, I tried importing the character as an alembic into Houdini. It all worked well except for the character's eyes. You see the eyes are not a physical eyeball, it's an oldschool rig with a flat plane and the rig is attached to the texture so that it moves it accross the eye UV.
problem is, when I try to export the arnold shaders from Maya to Houdini, it does not transfer the rig data on that iris. In maya, this node is a place3dtexture attached to a UVproject node, but after importing into Houdini, the place3dTexture node is removed (i assume because it is not native to Arnold).
I am lost and not sure how to move forward with this. It seems like such a silly problem.
I am an environment artist and mostly deal with environmental simulations so my apologies if this is a silly question.

Just of the top of my head, for a quick and dirty solution, and if the uv’s for the eyes are still intact, I’d say maybe bake the animated texture for each eye into an animated texture sequence in Maya, and project those texture sequences onto each eye Houdini ?

Can you potentially export it as Arnold proxy/stand-in sequence? .ass or whatever format Arnold uses

Then you should be able to render as proxy or stand-in directly in Houdini along with your environment