Hi All

I've done a few searches but I am having troubles finding a good workflow plan for Modeling in Maya and applying VFX and rendering in Houdini. I'm looking for some guidelines on preparing a model for use in Houdini for Rain, Snow and possibly destruction VFX. I attached a pic of a scene I am working on for this project. Anyways, any help with avoiding gotchas and workflow tips would be greatly appreciated. My fear is that I will get too far into it and realize I've made a huge workflow mistake. First thing I noticed was that in Maya my scene is proper scale but in Houdini it's huge.

My plan as of now is the following
1. Model the scene (Probably will keep it High Poly)
2. UV and Texture
3. Bake texture maps
4. Bring into Houdini and apply VFX
5. Render in Mantra

I'm looking to render 3 extremely short shots(Maybe 6 seconds a piece), a rain scene, a snow scene and a sunny day scene. Might do a destruction scene if I have time.


Thank you all for your time and help!

Hi, the gotcha is Maya works in a standard 1 unit = 10 cm and Houdini works in 1 unit = 1 m. So be sure to scale your maya geometry on export via a script or some other way.

Apart from that make sure there's no double faces and the normals are all correct.

rob