Tried to convert an H8 project to H9 by reading an H8 hip file into H9 and doing some additional cutting and pasting.

I was delighted to see how almost everything worked. The data cooked properly, lighting looked good, shaders worked, and renders were fine. The hip file was bloated with some unneeded parameters, but that didn't seem to matter. Then, little problems started cropping up with the geometry and lighting that I didn't initially notice.

After reading some SESI reference materials and getting some help on the forum I discovered this is not a good approach and the general recommendation is to start projects from scratch using H9.

This wouldn't be so bad if you're beginning a new project, but if you have old jobs that need to be revised or jobs that have been in production for months… and are scheduled to continue for months, starting from scratch isn't a great option.

Surely, if an H8 file can be loaded into H9 and “almost” work, it couldn't be too difficult to provide some sort of import or conversion function that would allow users to update H8 hip files to H9 without starting from scratch?

Is there anything that can safely be read into H9 from an H8 file that will work in production?

Thanks.

Actually - what might be quite useful for this process may be functionality similar to that which appears under the Materials menu on Objects: “Remove Unchanged Local Material Parameters” and allow the user to “Remove all Properties which are set to default values”.

This could be an option when loading H8 scenes, but could definitely be useful in a node's Gear menu to be run when elected by the user. This could serve to clean up nodes quickly and (relatively) safely, perhaps?

Cheers,
Jason

PS. I wonder if this is scriptable? ie, can you access a Property's default value?

Does opscripting out the entire file with the -b option and then sourcing the result get you anywhere?
I'm going to have to tackle this problem soon so I'm very interested in any experiences people have with converting H8 files.

The big problem bringing H8 files into H9 is lights cameras and rops. SOHO looks for very specific things, and the old objs/rops don't necessarily deliver them in the same way. Lights especially. Cameras less so, and rops less so again. Motion blur won't work for starters.

Everything else is pretty OK. There were a couple of default changes between H8 and H9 so watch out for an opscript -rb approach. Grid size default changed from 1 to 10 for instance.

In summary, it can be done, but there's a bit of clean-up work to be done afterwards. You don't want to be going back and forth that's for sure.

Cheers