Hi!

Newbie here. I have been searching this forum for related threads and still haven't found certain answers, I apologize in advance if I overlooked any that addresses these issues.

So I have a Maya background and am slowly learning Houdini, I am working on my student film and I am trying to get help from my fellow classmates who are all Maya users. I have many characters that need to be animated and this is what I wanted to get help on from them.

The problem is I want to get all these animated characters back into Houdini. Since the FBX import does not support skin weights, I would have to do double work: rigging+skinning in both Maya and Houdini. Will Skin weight export be available in the next FBX importer? If so I was just curious when that would be…

To work around this I was thinking that maybe I could export an obj sequence of the animated characters from Maya back into Houdini, bypassing the need for rigs completely. Is this a good or bad idea?

Ultimately I want to instance the character animation in Houdini.

Thank you!!
Deb

What release of Houdini are you using? Latest builds of H9.1 should support skin weights from maya characters.

Go to the downloads page and download the latest build of H9.1. You have to scroll down the page to the Daily Builds section:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_download&Itemid=208 [sidefx.com]

You should also be able to export/import the characters as geo point caches as well to get just the animated geometry.


Note to all: FBX will continue to be improved between releases. It's development is not restricted to major releases. If you find a problem, report it. If you need a feature, let us know any time.