I have just started messing around with houdini…so I apologize for my ignorance. I've created smoke using Pyro FX, then inverted the density field iso so it appears as a volume. I need to export this geometry as an OBJ to bring it into other programs, but am not having any luck. I know I need to convert it to polygons, but can't figure out which node gets converted. I found the solution on the houdini 10 forum :

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&p=74776&sid=23aa338b8ab405ecf37165403442f848 [sidefx.com]

but it doesn't seem to work the same in houdini12, as no upres/lowres geometry tabs seem to be created. Any help would be hugely appreciated! Thanks in advance.

//brian

not sure why you want to convert pyro to polys unless your trying to render some npr toon effect, but you can ust a convert volume on the dop i/o that brings in your fields. under group put the number of the primitive that you want to convert or leave it blank to convert all of them.

however if you're not trying to achieve a toon effect and want to bring the volumes into another piece of software, to my knowledge you cant do it in an obj. you'd have to use some other format.. which would change depending on what software your trying to use it in.

Thanks for the help! It worked, and that would have taken me hours to figure out. I'm actually an architecture student and experimenting with some form generating. I just need the volume that the pyro creates, it won't be used for rendering. I'd like to be able to take it into rhino and maya. I've had luck converting metaballs to polygons and saving the geometry obj, so that was my best guess as to how I would go about this.

Sorry to bump an old topic, but I am having difficulties converting the PyroFX -Smoke into polygons. Has the conversion method changed in Houdini 13? I seem to be unable to find a “convert Volume”.
I was also wondering whether the converted geometry (a metaball-deduced polygon, I presume) could be exported as an alembic file (thereby retaining the animation).

Hmmmm :? Convert Volumes to Polygons ,Maybe this is not good idea ,Because you can export your explosion as Volume to the Maya .

If you using Maya ,So you can export your Volume Phenomenon like explosions With Houdini Engine and Import it to the Maya perfectly ,Then you can convert it to Polygon if you like .

But if you wanna convert it to Polygon in the Houdini ,So you have too many ways like “Volume Convert SOP” , “MetaBalls ” , VDB , “Particle Fluid Surface” and etc 8)