Hi all,

After researching for some days, apparently there is no way to export Houdini transform handles into Maya through the digital asset (correct me if i'm wrong). So one way i found to do this would be through the Maya connection editor between a locator and the Houdini asset. So, in Houdini i have a grid and a sphere and the sphere is controlling the grid extrusion by its position and scale attribute. It is a very simple setup with attribute transfer to test in Maya and everything is working fine except one thing.

My goal is to control the sphere inside Maya with the traditional “transform handle” so i can control where the extrusion on the grid is happening by moving the handle instead of typing numbers. Once i imported the asset in Maya, i could attach the locator transform handle to the whole asset using the connection editor however, i cannot see the sphere transform node parameter from Houdini in the connection editor, only the main translation parameter that controls the whole asset. After that, the result that i got so far is the locator translation handle transforming the whole asset and not only the sphere inside the asset and therefore, i cannot move the extrusion around.

That said, in this case, does anyone know how to connect the sphere transform parameters to the locator handle in Maya through the connection editor so i could control the extrusion on the grid? Any info would be appreciated. Thanks

The current intent of the plugin is to have Maya locators come in as points, rather than trying to have them act as a transform handle directly. (I haven't tried this myself yet - I'll let you know how it goes after I do). Or if you wanted to use a Maya shape functioning as a handle you could do that instea. But yes, we should make it easier to expose the handle directly.

Bringing in the locator with an objectMerge, and then starting up houdini out of Maya and looking at the geometry spreadsheet, there is one point with orient and scale attributes set appropriately, so you should be able to get at
those values. I guess providing some example wrangles on our part would be useful.

You could also export part or all of the sphere objects transform to the asset, and then connect the corresponding parts of the locator's transform on the maya side. e.g. if I exported the sphere's translateX as tx2, and my asset node is called myAsset1:

connectAttr -f locator1.translateX |myAsset1.houdiniAssetParm_tx2;

But then you could just as well export the extrude parms and connect the locator directly to those.

so, still nothing about this ?
ive stacked here with this, have a task to do a procedural model with 8 controls handle in maya


just want to create a asset that everyone can use in maya in different scene and move each control with translate handle in maya, without any setups inside, just load an asset and its ready. So there is no way still ??? Side FX are you gonna support the houdini engine for maya or what ? this is really sad, as i remember it has no support for years and no updates

You're right, there have been a lot of requests for exposing various types of handles in Maya, especially translate handles. There's already an RFE for exposing handles, but I will add a link to this forum topic as well.

A Maya locator would work fine for a transform handle. We need to look at what other handles we'd like to expose, and whether we want to go the “instantiate a maya object for every exposed handle” route, or whether we want to be able to use Maya manipulators directly based on which handle we've activated.

And given that we're already providing the beginnings of an engine toolset that can be used with all engine plugins, we'd really like to provide a consistent way of exposing handles for all the plugins. Any feedback about what other handles you'd like to see, and how you'd like to see them exposed would be appreciated.

juliap
Any feedback about what other handles you'd like to see, and how you'd like to see them exposed would be appreciated.

For consistency and longetivity I'd like to see it reflect how Houdini does it natively which means either hda handles or python states. I love the idea of python states but it's not used enough to be called a success(I'm guessing this is down to too many hoops to jump through to get them working). Hda handles is not a favourite of mine and I don't see it scaling well, how dow we get an arbitrary amount of handles for example? But it would be my best bet here.