Hello,

I am new to Houdini. I only have a short period of time to create a smoke simulation and export to Maya so I chose to not learn the entire Houdini inteface but only the nodes I needed to work with.
I did a smoke simulation and I would like to export it into Maya to shade it and render it. I saw a few possibilities like OPen VDB, Houdini Engine,etc but I can't make any of them work…

Would anyone be able to help me out?

Thank you in advance!

If you want to shade and render it as a Maya fluid, bringing it in using the houdiniEngine plugin should work. For example, I created a simple pyro explosion, collapsed the nodes to a subnet and the created an asset from the subnet. It doesn't matter if the Pyro Shader makes it into the subnet if you're planning to shade it in Maya anyway.

Then I load the asset into Maya, and it has a maya fluid as an output. Now I can use the shading attributes on the fluidShape to control the shading, and then render in Maya.

Note that if you want to nCache the output Maya fluid, you can't do it directly because we already use the cache interface to connect from the plugin. You will need to export the cache instead, create a new maya fluid, save an attribute preset from the original output fluid and apply it to the new fluid to preserve the settings, and then attach the exported cache.

If you want to render in bifrost … it doesn't look like they've exposed any VDB import or Alembic import for Aero yet (although I may have missed something) so there's probably no easy way to bring your data in there.

@juilap

Thank you, I'll give it a try!