Hi!

I'm a casual Houdini user and I'm just trying to do something very simple - export deforming geometry to Maya - I did an export and it creaetd an fpc directory with an MC and XML files in it but no fbx file! So Maya could not read it as far as I know.

Then I tried exporting the simplest thing I could (a polygon sphere with no animation) to FBX and it refused to write anything!

What's wrong? Am I being lame and forgetting something really simple??

Houdini is a great package from a great company but there are sometimes basic things that are very hard to learn how to do for non-hard-core users like myself…

Eric

One thing I forgot to mention; I'm using Houdini Escape; maybe that makes a difference….

Try to save fbx as binary not asciii as it is by default. I remember that used to lead to strange results in Maya from time to time. Exporting with Escape or Master has no difference, but you can provide build number you are working on and more fbx details such as version of the exporter - but i'm assuming it's the latest one.

Cheers,
Kuba

Which Houdini build are you using? We've recently switched over to FBX SDK 2011.3, so perhaps that could have affected it.

However, I've just tried the same thing (new scene, put down a sphere, change it to be a polygon sphere, File->Export->FBX) and it worked fine. Just to double-check, is the destination folder actually writable (permissions?) and is there enough disk space?

Thanks a lot for the answers guys I think I've figured it out -

It looks like it's a Windows path problem!! Houdini and fbx are absolved of responsibility yet again…. Our directory structure contains some nasty path mapping that seems to be throwing Houdini off. (like server names, whatever, I'm not network savvy enough to know all of that stuff)

So when I point the export location to $HIP (which is on our network filesystem), it's able to create the fpc directory but somehow not the .fbx file.

However when I export to directories on the Local Drive, it works fine! I guess it's the fact that it's a nice neat path like C:\ that works. It's funny because everybody warns me about working on my local drive but now I have to….

So in summary, Houdini is still in my cool book, and Windows is still
@#$@-ed up. Anybody else run into this and want to vent?
Eric

You could try using the latest build. I know the previous FBX SDK itself had some problems with network paths, and at the same time I think they may have fixed it in the latest version. So you could get the latest Houdini build and give that a try.

Yeah now that I think it makes sense that FBX might be causing the problem since $HIP is correct.
I'm using version Houdini 11.0.504 and FBX 200900; I'll try and upgrade and see if that fixes things