In short, I'm trying to get a Maya animated camera (only rotated / translated) into Houdini. I read the best way to do this was to use chandump.mel - which I proceeded to download. But for some reason Maya's not doing anything when I run it. No errors, no nothing. The site I downloaded it from didn't have any tutorials / walkthroughs so I assumed it was something easy.

I'm assuming I'm doing something wrong still, I copied the mel into my scripts folder, sourced it, nothing. I copied the entire contents of the mel into the command box - and ran it. Nothing. So - what am I doing wrong?

Or does anybody know of a better way to get Maya channels into Houdini?

Searching on the mailing archive, I found this:
http://www.sidefx.com/community/interact/mailarchive/index.php?view=WEB&msgid=001201c3adec$4b1b3ff0$1b045544@the6adj7r9tq7r&perpage=20&revdate=off [sidefx.com]

The direct link to what seems like a well packaged tool:
http://www.thebeeland.net/liaison/ [thebeeland.net]

I've never tried it myself though.

hey BriAnimations

jeffs tool is great,
ive personally used it, and he's really cool with questions etc

another solution i was using was bringing the exported camera channels in through chops pretty much by exporting the channels into a mov then using this page

http://cade.scope.edu/courseware/notes/houdini/integrate.html [cade.scope.edu]
i converted the equation to

focal_length = aperture / (2tan(aov/2)) i really hope this is right :-)
what concerns me about that tut is
“ pixel aspect ratio (Maya) and pixel aspect (Houdini) should also be left at 1 (as is usual) for this formula to work.”

i followed that page for a while until i came across jeffs page

anyways
theres also page

http://studentpages.scad.edu/%7Elcampb22/tutorials/cam_matching/maya_camera.html [studentpages.scad.edu]

let me know if u come right
it wasnt too complicated for too long :-)

later

Not sure this is the same problem but chandump would freeze up on me too whenever i used the “+” button to browse to the out file, so I'd have to explicitly type the path to the chan file I was writing to. If you notice when you use the browse button it doesn't show you the path, just the filename. Just type c:\foo.chan instead and see if that works. Also make sure the object in question is currently selected

I downloaded the Liaison script but I'm having some trouble getting it working.

I followed the directions:

1.) I opened a fresh Maya scene and a fresh Houdini scene. I went into Maya's script editor and typed:

commandPort -name “:2222”;

Then I opened my Houdini file (textport) and typed:

openport 500

2.) I opened up the “liaison_v1.0.030b.py” script and replaced the variables with my own camera name, file path's, etc.

3.) ……???

Here is the online documentation:

http://www.thebeeland.net/liaison/tech_desc.htm [thebeeland.net]

I'm not sure what to do now. The documentation for this script is pretty limited, as is my knowledge of working with Python scripts… any suggestions?

Hmm … I don't think port 500 will work. Try using 5000.

How do I run the Python script itself? What I'm missing is a way to execute the script in either Maya or Houdini.

You need to have Python to run the script. Linux systems usually have it already installed these days or can be easily installed. http://www.python.org/ [python.org]

hey hey

a, yeah u need python, and fortunately its an easy install.
once u have that, u'll just run it like anyother app.

b, u'll know it works when maya crashes, doesnt sound good, but jeffs tool wasnt writtten for the latter versions of maya, i think 6+

“Maya freezing is odd. I wrote this back when maya 5 was the current
version, so I'm wondering if v6's commandport setup has been changed
slightly. I would suspect that the freeze is being caused by the commandPort -close
at line 69 of liaison_functions.py.” - jeff

however it does create a camera in ur houdini scene, with all the data from maya.

could u tell me about ur system, ie, os, maya version etc :-)

as for the port number, in my experience, 500 seemed to work,
however it would be nice to know why edward suggested 5000?

anyways
all the best

aracid

I thought ports under 1024 were designated for system use? I guess it might not care.

Thanks for the input! I've been pulled onto another task but I'll get back to this one next week. Jeffrey emailed me back with some info.

People looking through this thread may find this useful:

“First off, let me apologize for the un-user friendliness of the script It's in dire need of a rewrite.

If you have python installed on your machine, it should be as easy as typing ”python <scriptname>" into a shell (or dos prompt, if you're in windows). If you do not have python installed, you can download it from here:

http://www.python.org/2.4.1/ [python.org]

It's available for most every operating system in service, so you shouldn't have any problems getting it up and running.

Please let me know if I can do anything else to help out!
–Jeff"

aracid


http://cade.scope.edu/courseware/notes/houdini/integrate.html [cade.scope.edu]
i converted the equation to

focal_length = aperture / (2tan(aov/2)) i really hope this is right :-)
what concerns me about that tut is
“ pixel aspect ratio (Maya) and pixel aspect (Houdini) should also be left at 1 (as is usual) for this formula to work.”

Hi aracid …. what “aov” stands for in your equation?

thanks

aov = angle of view

for proper Maya to Houdini camera matching:

in Maya:
set horisontalAperture = verticalAperture

in Houdini:
focalLength = focalLength_Maya;
aperture = horisontalApture_Maya * 25.4;