I have an animated character in Maya 2009 and anted to bring that into Houdini 10. The character is animated by a geometry cache.

I selected the geometry in maya and did a “Export Selection” and exported as FBX file, toggling on “Animation” in the export options. When importing the file into Houdini, I see the character's geometry, but I cannot get that thing moving.

So I baked the Animation in Maya, then did another export, but again I cannot see any movement in Houdini.

Is there anything else or special one needs to do when importing Maya FBX into Houdini?

EDIT: Ok, I changed the geocache in maya a little, now it works.


How do you bring your Maya animations into Houdini?

As far as I know, most people do use geometry caching since it is one of the most reliable methods, though I may be wrong. In my experience, it is sometimes tricky to get Maya to export the cache properly that will most often cause incorrect results, but once you're past that, things are generally fine.

Another thing to note that is that if you use single-precision storage for vertex caches in Maya, you need to tell this to Houdini on import by checking the “Treat All Vertex Caches as Single-Precision Types” option on the FBX Import dialog under the “Compatibility Options” header.

Whenever I take animation from Maya into Houdini I try to use FBX first - and about 98% of the time I have great success. Make sure to check mark the box in the top right corner that bakes the geometry into the FBX file when exporting from Maya. This is crucial. That's all I do different from the default settings, then once it's in Maya I scale it down to 0.01 and viola! C'est fine.

I dont think I use geometry caching or anything like that, unless its on by default. Dont have maya at home to check.