What I'm trying to do is send pre-animated characters from maya into the houdini crowd engine – (this seems to work fine with the fbx import) –but then I want to send that crowd sim back to maya for final render with Vray. Not sure if this is possible.

Has anyone had experience with this?

Thanks in advance.

-Mike

It depends on what kind of format you need the results of the crowd sim to be in for Maya/Vray. For example, if you output agent primitives to Alembic, you'll end up with a copy of the deformed skin geometry for each agent. That may be acceptable depending on how large your sim is - you will end up with a rather large amount of data if you have a decent number of agents. For deforming shapes, you ideally want to just store a single copy of the rest geometry, along with each agent's transforms, so that the deformation can be done at render time (which is what Mantra does). I don't know offhand what kind of support Maya/Vray has for that sort of thing, but you can easily access and write out each agent's transforms to the necessary file format using Python (the hou.Agent class)

Thanks cwhite. I'm still researching. I might just bake in textures for those crowd sims and render in mantra.

-mike