Hi,

I'm testing exporting geometry/camera from maya to houdini is a dae_fbx. The fbx file I exported is called $HIP/s030_11.dae but when I do the houdini import it sets the file name to:

$HIP/s030_11.dae#pCylinder1,convertoff

This gives it an error so it locks the node. It looks like it's trying to extract only the cylinder geometry from the file. If I change it to $HIP/s030_11.dae it works but only gets one object from the file.

Anybody know what's going on? I've never done this before so I might be making some basic mistakes.

I'm surprised there aren't more docs on converting from Maya to Houdini since it's done very often but is full of pitfalls… javascript:emoticon(':cry:')

Thanks!

Eric

There's several issues involved here. Let me go over them one-by-one.

I'm testing exporting geometry/camera from maya to houdini is a dae_fbx.

This is the main problem. “Dae” means Collada, not FBX. Maya just exports Collada through the same SDK as it uses for FBX, but if you look inside your file, you will find that it is purely Collada. So you have two options. One is to import the file into Houdini using our Collada importer (File->Import->Collada). Another is to export from Maya as true FBX (the file extension must be .fbx), and then import it into Houdini using our Filmbox importer (File->Import->Filmbox FBX).

$HIP/s030_11.dae#pCylinder1,convertoff

This gives it an error so it locks the node. It looks like it's trying to extract only the cylinder geometry from the file. If I change it to $HIP/s030_11.dae it works but only gets one object from the file.

This is by design. The File SOP only supports geometry, as in “a geometric object”. FBX files can contain other data, as well as many separately transformed objects. Thus, a File SOP will be created for each one. Removing the string after ‘#’ is actually incorrect, and will cause the File SOP to import the first object it finds in the file.

Furthermore, the File SOP is locked not because of an error. This is an option you chose when importing FBX files - look under the “General Options” in the FBX import dialog. Leaving the nodes unlocked will mean that the geometry will be re-imported from the original FBX file every time a node cooks, which means that FBX file is still required to be in the same location on disk.