Since it's a Max file you'd probably want to export it as an FBX rather than OBJ, as it'll preserve the materials.
That said, opening the file in Max, it's an old format, and it uses a dozen plugins (missing DLLs), from Brazil to Greebles - which may account for a lot of geometry, so the model may not even look like the renders you've seen and some/all materials are probably FBX incompatible.
It's also badly modelled, or at least not modelled for moving to other applications. 448 primitive groups, all named Box001…Box002…etc.
Honestly, I think you'd save time and have something more useful at the end just modelling it (or at least re-texturing it) from scratch.
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Technical Discussion » Texturing Help
- AdamT
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Technical Discussion » Where is View Roto?
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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I'm bashing my head against a wall trying to get background images to appear on an ortho camera in the viewport. In the past there was a Roto View folder in the extra camera parms, but it's gone… is it replaced with something else?
edit: Ok so the docs say Display options now uses the Background image from the camera, but the image is way off-screen as it's applying Zoom (and it can't be disabled for the camera in Display options) … if I set Ortho width to 100000 then the image appears centered. How do we manipulate the imageplane for the background without adjusting the camera's Screen position (which affects it's world position)?
edit: Ok so the docs say Display options now uses the Background image from the camera, but the image is way off-screen as it's applying Zoom (and it can't be disabled for the camera in Display options) … if I set Ortho width to 100000 then the image appears centered. How do we manipulate the imageplane for the background without adjusting the camera's Screen position (which affects it's world position)?
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Houdini to Unreal 4 workflow
- AdamT
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I'm getting the same with UE 4.7 exporting from H14.
Setting normals with Normals or Facet SOPs has no effect … I'm guessing Smoothing Groups is a hold-out from 3DS Max, and needs to be written to/set in addition to vert normals in the FBX exporter. It's not that big a deal anyway if you're normal mapping, although I'm trying to get normals from Substance Designer to work properly in it, but I guess that's another story. (edit: so TC_Normalmap needs setting manually in texture compression for pre-cooked normal maps).
UE4's unit size is a jarring weird too. I was getting tangent warnings from my FBX geo until I set a x10 uniform scale to my exports (which were ~1 unit volume in Houdini). Adventures, adventures.
Setting normals with Normals or Facet SOPs has no effect … I'm guessing Smoothing Groups is a hold-out from 3DS Max, and needs to be written to/set in addition to vert normals in the FBX exporter. It's not that big a deal anyway if you're normal mapping, although I'm trying to get normals from Substance Designer to work properly in it, but I guess that's another story. (edit: so TC_Normalmap needs setting manually in texture compression for pre-cooked normal maps).
UE4's unit size is a jarring weird too. I was getting tangent warnings from my FBX geo until I set a x10 uniform scale to my exports (which were ~1 unit volume in Houdini). Adventures, adventures.
Technical Discussion » FBX export uv channel order
- AdamT
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It's always been this way AFAIK, but it's a bit of a pain when exporting to other applications, especially game engines (though at least Unity has a UV swap on import option).
The FBX exporter is long in need of an update. It's really quite a pain for exporting to games for instance… consider a single geo HDA which generates procedural geometry. You can't export groups as separate objects in an FBX, and you can't export based on frame (it tries to export a vertex cache). Both of these you can do with OBJ, but then you lose everything an FBX supports (i.e. vert colors is important for games…though again, alpha component support is desirable too). I could go on, but these as basic essentials would be a good starting point.
The only alternative is to use Houdini Engine, which I have started doing, but I really don't like the way it creates (bakes) geometry, especially when lots of versioning is going on. Maybe there's a nice way to customise it, but I need to find the time to find it, and it's not a simple thing to dig into.
When I get time to put some use-case examples together I'll submit an RFE. I've been saying that for…eek, a long time!
The FBX exporter is long in need of an update. It's really quite a pain for exporting to games for instance… consider a single geo HDA which generates procedural geometry. You can't export groups as separate objects in an FBX, and you can't export based on frame (it tries to export a vertex cache). Both of these you can do with OBJ, but then you lose everything an FBX supports (i.e. vert colors is important for games…though again, alpha component support is desirable too). I could go on, but these as basic essentials would be a good starting point.
The only alternative is to use Houdini Engine, which I have started doing, but I really don't like the way it creates (bakes) geometry, especially when lots of versioning is going on. Maybe there's a nice way to customise it, but I need to find the time to find it, and it's not a simple thing to dig into.
When I get time to put some use-case examples together I'll submit an RFE. I've been saying that for…eek, a long time!
Technical Discussion » H15 - poly bevel tool
- AdamT
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grayOlorin
One thing that houdini could do better than anyone is to drive the bevel amount with a vertex attribute. That is more for the procedural modeling though
I tried doing this recently. Was intending to make an RFE for it, just haven't found the time to put a decent sample case-use together. It would definitely be useful.
Houdini Lounge » Houdini 14 and RenderMan 19 ?
- AdamT
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theviolator
That might not be the case, unless you personally spoke with somebody from Pixar. It might mean, that the ball is in SideFX's court, and it's up to them to decide if they want to support it or not.
I have spoken to Pixar and they told me that SideFX has to do the bridge.
I don't recall where (maybe fxguide.com), but there was mention on the web of Renderman 19's Houdini implementation being underway last year by a third party.
Pixar's own FAQ supports this:
http://renderman.pixar.com/view/DP25847 [renderman.pixar.com]
There's lots of competition, but this isn't the sort of industry where anyone survives by standing alone. For sure there are companies like Autodesk, who'd rather everyone else went away, but they have more businessmen than nerds running the show, yet even they recognise and understand that the industry uses more than one piece of software.
Edited by - Jan. 30, 2015 03:07:30
Houdini Lounge » Cookie SOP? Where is the love?
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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Neil, you are a star.
I've done a few real world tests, as a nicely formed torus is bit easy.
3% Polyreduce from a fairly complex 2.5m poly VDB of a canyon.
Previously: 10 mins 35 seconds
Now: 46 seconds
x13 speed increase!
Simpler geo gives smaller returns, a 463k poly ray cast grid down to 5s from 15s, which is terrific in itself, but obviously it's the big, dirty geometry that needed the TLC. Amazing.
Now I'm wondering how faster it might be if it used more than 3% CPU…(yeah pushing my luck perhaps )
Another day perhaps…thank you for this, you made my life a lot easier
(And timer & Esc now work perfectly!)
I've done a few real world tests, as a nicely formed torus is bit easy.
3% Polyreduce from a fairly complex 2.5m poly VDB of a canyon.
Previously: 10 mins 35 seconds
Now: 46 seconds
x13 speed increase!
Simpler geo gives smaller returns, a 463k poly ray cast grid down to 5s from 15s, which is terrific in itself, but obviously it's the big, dirty geometry that needed the TLC. Amazing.
Now I'm wondering how faster it might be if it used more than 3% CPU…(yeah pushing my luck perhaps )
Another day perhaps…thank you for this, you made my life a lot easier
(And timer & Esc now work perfectly!)
Houdini Lounge » Cookie SOP? Where is the love?
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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ndickson
You'll be glad to know that about 80% of the time in PolyReduce on a 500x1000 triangle torus (1M tris) was being spent repeatedly traversing a linked list of maybe 3000 items to find the end maybe 3 million times. That part can be reduced to effectively nothing by using an array instead of a linked list. I'm going to go out on a not-very-long limb and guess that other meshes will exhibit the same unnecessary 5x slowdown. I've also put better interruptibility in, but I'll wait until tomorrow to see if my changes break anything before putting it in the public daily builds for Saturday.
Moral of the story: don't use linked lists unless it's absolutely necessary, and it's almost never necessary. :wink:
That sounds awesome, I can't wait to give it a run
I'll file fresh cases of this cropping up if it continues. The Esc issue has been there for years, I've just gotten used to it as a fact of life with my older, slower PCs.
Houdini Lounge » Cookie SOP? Where is the love?
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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Skybar
When will the Cookie SOP get some love? I haven't been around since before h12, but since then it has been quite broken. When it works, it works. But when it doesn't, which is more often than not, it just creates a mess.
I guess a VDB solution is fine sometimes for boleans, but when you need to keep the original geometry then what do you do?
Game graphics tend to get the worst end of the stick, as they not only need to retain the original UVs, but also tend towards the lower end of the mesh resolution spectrum, which makes cookie operations even more likely to break up.
VDB is useful sometimes (and actually I do use it a lot), but unless you're using pretty high settings it can be difficult to get clean, matching geometry output… and that's only half the story as you need to get it back to a poly object.
Convertvdb adaptive reduction can get reasonable results, but it's nowhere near as good as Polyreduce - which you'd have to be crazy to use on a naked VDB mesh. Combined adaptive and Polyreduce gets results, but it's dicey depending on the geometry.
So yep, totally agree: Cookie needs some love.
Polyreduce could do with some love too. I'd be interested in why it's so slow compared to other applications - it can be fatal if you accidentally drop it in a network with millions of input prims .. Esc to cancel doesn't work, regardless of what the tooltip bar says. Remesh can gotcha with that too.
Houdini Lounge » multi CPU sim vs. single GPU
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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I have a dual Xeon workstation, and cook fluid sims with a 6GB Titan Black (2nd GPU). The Titan is about x10 faster than the CPUs, which from research appears to be about the same as a (much more expensive) Tesla; but note that not all sims support GPU cooking atm.
Bottlenecks in RAM, not sure, or not noticed, but it's a different world when you aren't relying on disk caching (I have 128GB).
Obviously sim resolution and setup is important…the 6GB on my GPU appears to be partly wasted with nVidia drivers as they're still stuck (or were anyway, I haven't checked in a while) in 32bit address space… ATI cards probably aren't, but I've no idea regarding their performance vs nVidia compute.
I've no experience with network batching sims.
Note, you'll still usually want to cook your final sims on CPU a lot of the time when you're after high quality production results (beyond GPU RAM limits), but GPU cooking is extremely useful when fleshing things out. Seek the best of both if you plan to do a lot of sim work and can afford to…and it's always easier to upgrade GPUs over time.
Bottlenecks in RAM, not sure, or not noticed, but it's a different world when you aren't relying on disk caching (I have 128GB).
Obviously sim resolution and setup is important…the 6GB on my GPU appears to be partly wasted with nVidia drivers as they're still stuck (or were anyway, I haven't checked in a while) in 32bit address space… ATI cards probably aren't, but I've no idea regarding their performance vs nVidia compute.
I've no experience with network batching sims.
Note, you'll still usually want to cook your final sims on CPU a lot of the time when you're after high quality production results (beyond GPU RAM limits), but GPU cooking is extremely useful when fleshing things out. Seek the best of both if you plan to do a lot of sim work and can afford to…and it's always easier to upgrade GPUs over time.
Houdini Lounge » Houdini for Indie Game Devs
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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Well, Apprentice has been around for a long time now and it's still there, while HD has actually evolved into Indie. I can't imagine SESI pulling the plug on it.
They're not like some other company that comes to mind
They're not like some other company that comes to mind
Houdini Lounge » Houdini Indie rendering
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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From the product landing page:
“Houdini Indie also gives artists render farm access using HQueue on Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud.”
“Houdini Indie also gives artists render farm access using HQueue on Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud.”
Houdini Learning Materials » Help on which program to start with through 3d world ?
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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Take a look at Scupltris, which is Zbrush's little sister. Don't be fooled by the pricetag (free), it's a great place to start and simple enough to get a feel for whether or not 3D sculpting appeals to you.
Neither Sculptris nor Zbrush need high end rigs, they're entirely CPU dependent and 32bit to boot.
Neither Sculptris nor Zbrush need high end rigs, they're entirely CPU dependent and 32bit to boot.
Houdini Lounge » Houdini 14 Wishlist
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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stu
I'm hoping that viewport selection sees some attention in H14, particularly edge selection - I'll inadvertently select an edge on the hidden backside of geometry more often than should be the case.
Remembering selections would be nice too, i.e. trying to click Group Selection and you click something else… undo, and voila your selection is lost forever.
It would be very good to see some of the older SOPs that have to do a lot of heavy lifting get multithreading, particularly PolyReduce and Remesh - and an improvement to the ability to ESC cancel operations. More than a few times I've fallen foul of the 0.1 Remesh default on complex geometry, it rarely ends well at 3% CPU load.
Houdini Indie and Apprentice » Houdini FX to full version
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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Hi Daniel,
Support will convert any Apprentice-locked files (.hipnc, otl) when you upgrade, just ask about it after your purchase goes through. I had my files converted overnight no problems.
Support will convert any Apprentice-locked files (.hipnc, otl) when you upgrade, just ask about it after your purchase goes through. I had my files converted overnight no problems.
Technical Discussion » How to render huge polycount?
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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The problem with Remesh (ditto PolyReduce) is that it's single threaded.
Depending on how many polys are in each individual piece, it could be a PITA getting appropriate settings, tweaking between bakes, and it will consume a fair amount of additional memory.
Whenever I need to reduce poly geometry in the multi-millions, I take it into another application. For example, 3DSMax's ProOptimize is pretty good, and features realtime tweaking once it's pre-processed the geometry.
Depending on how many polys are in each individual piece, it could be a PITA getting appropriate settings, tweaking between bakes, and it will consume a fair amount of additional memory.
Whenever I need to reduce poly geometry in the multi-millions, I take it into another application. For example, 3DSMax's ProOptimize is pretty good, and features realtime tweaking once it's pre-processed the geometry.
Houdini Learning Materials » Houdini fx v/s Max
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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I'm not a VFX artist, but I recently made the full-on switch from Max to Houdini, and I can't understate how surprised I am at how much I enjoy using it for my real work vs when I was just learning and experimenting.
The transition has been interesting, as I think the most striking thing isn't what the applications can do, but the way you do them. Houdini is a lot like working on paper, with everything laid out in front of you. It's incredibly reassuring, but it does mean you need to learn to be organised if you're not already.
There are still things in Max that I miss - a few modelling features such as UV mapping, and it's spline editing (well, only Fillet & Chamfer), but I find myself opening it less and less, and when I do I just find it rather clumsy and frustrating.
Ultimately it was a tough switch because games (my biz) are so focussed on Max & Maya, but Houdini does work well in concert with them both, so you don't need to throw anything away. Two knives are better in a fight than one, so I'm told
The transition has been interesting, as I think the most striking thing isn't what the applications can do, but the way you do them. Houdini is a lot like working on paper, with everything laid out in front of you. It's incredibly reassuring, but it does mean you need to learn to be organised if you're not already.
There are still things in Max that I miss - a few modelling features such as UV mapping, and it's spline editing (well, only Fillet & Chamfer), but I find myself opening it less and less, and when I do I just find it rather clumsy and frustrating.
Ultimately it was a tough switch because games (my biz) are so focussed on Max & Maya, but Houdini does work well in concert with them both, so you don't need to throw anything away. Two knives are better in a fight than one, so I'm told
Houdini Lounge » max cam
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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Have you tried a simple scene to narrow down what may be going wrong?
I've not had any issues yet with camera animation, but I've not had to import anything complex. The attached archive contains a working test scene, .max, .fbx and .hip.
Note I work in Meters in Max, which shouldn't have any bearing but sometimes, well, fbx transfers can seem have a mind of their own and it pays to keep everything as 1:1 as possible.
You could also try parenting your camera to a null object in the centre of the scene in max.
If you still have no luck, perhaps a sample .max and .hip would help.
I've not had any issues yet with camera animation, but I've not had to import anything complex. The attached archive contains a working test scene, .max, .fbx and .hip.
Note I work in Meters in Max, which shouldn't have any bearing but sometimes, well, fbx transfers can seem have a mind of their own and it pays to keep everything as 1:1 as possible.
You could also try parenting your camera to a null object in the centre of the scene in max.
If you still have no luck, perhaps a sample .max and .hip would help.
Technical Discussion » Keep only looping edges
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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Technical Discussion » Keep only looping edges
- AdamT
- 184 posts
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