Hello, Marc. Thanks for the warm welcome and the informative reply
. But if it's okay with you, I would like to clarify a couple of things real quickly.
> 3) That depends on what you are doing. If the displacement map has been created correctly, i.e. the values match “over seam boundaries” AND if you have some “bleed” added to the displacement map, you should not get seams in the first place.
I'm still trying to get the hang of doing displacement maps, so I don't know the steps to take to do things like adding some “bleeding” to a displacement map within my edition of Maya. Do you know where I could find a step-by-step guide for the subject?
> 4) That depends on what you want to do in the end. Rigging is, still, a very much platform dependent thing. There's not “use this Rig there”-button. If you want to do platform-independent rigging, you need to use platform-independent rigging systems, which in themselves are, well, platforms.
What you can do is “bake” animations, bring them over as Alembic or FBX, add effects, bake the effects and bring those back to your animation system. Obviously you have to repeat that if you change the animation after the fact.
“Pipelining” … is still not easy.Your recommendation sounds good for applying visual effects such as fur, but what would I need to do for effects that require more interactivity like crowd sequences?
> 8) Quite easily. Although “move along the path” is not the same as “do not move along the path”. Houdini is “procedural”, so you have full control over everything, including deviations from given values.
That's good. I'm trying to rig a door panel within Maya so that it would go up and down along curve. Like something you would see on a sci-fi show such as Star Trek. But whenever I try to attach the door to the curve, it moves away from the starting position I would like it to be at, and flips all over the place when trying to animate it along the curve. So would it be possible to bring the door and the curve into Houdini, back-out the animation after I refine it, and then create some set-driven keys to control that animation inside of Maya?