With massive 4's ability to output fbx files per agent, did anyone try to bring simulations into Houdini yet?

I'm trying to do this to add some effects into my crowd simulation. The FBX files massive generated contains the animated skeleton per agent. What I'm stuck at is binding the geometries to these skeleton into Houdini. I've never brought a skinned object into Houdini before.

The ideal solution would be like what Massive did where you have one geometry instanced into every agent. Not having one geometry PER agent.

Can someone shed some insight?

No reply yet L:-(, maybe i should clarify.

I'm trying to get my geometry to bind to many different set of joint chains.

or even better, refrence the geometry to these skeleton at rendertime.

Anybody?

Hi, I'm trying to do something similar for a school project. I'm wondering if it will work to just extract agent positions from exported amc files, put them into csv format and then use the table import sop to get points as proxy objects for Rib Archives?

I'd love to know anything you figure out, and likewise would be willing to share information.

I can't comment as I've never used Massive. But here's some pointers that may help:

- amc/asf can be imported into .bclip files for File CHOPs using mcacclaim [sidefx.com]. You'll also get an hscript .cmd file that you can run to recreate the skeleton.
- I think FBX supports referencing via File CHOPs as well, so that's another way.
- Once you have the agent animation loaded into CHOPs, you can merge it in a way such that each agent can be processed using the Foreach CHOP [sidefx.com].

Thank you! That is very interesting, and I think could end up being very helpful.