Has anyone ever tried bringing in satellite orbital data into Houdini? I wasn't sure if someone had created a translator/asset. We have STK (Satellite ToolKit) but it's display and visualization capabilities are limited. I wondered if there was a way to bring in the data into Houdini (or even Houdini via Maya)

what format is the data in?

It looks like we can get it in Keplerian Elements, which are just numbers per element, combined creates the accurate orbit:

Orbital Inclination, Right Ascension of Ascending Node, Eccentricity, Argument of Perigee, Mean Motion, Mean Anomaly. I've seen one element that even had the kilometers.

I'm pulling it from here:
https://marine.rutgers.edu/cool/education/class/paul/orbits.html [marine.rutgers.edu]

hurrrmmmm….
I think you'll have to translate that data into something useful yourself…
I'm sure there are apps/scripts out there to do this - since NASA etc do use commercial software (Houdini, Maya etc) when they do visualisations…
then you could make a Houdini Digital Asset (HDA) that could read in that data and create an orbit.

Two ways for us…

We currently use the Python Skyfield package to translate TLE (Two Line Element) sets. Accurate, fine for just one satellite… but if you want to visualize trails, or many satellites, it's really slow.

I'm in the process of porting over SGP4 C code to VEX, but some calculations in it are meant to be in double precision… the time functions are useless without that… will either find a workaround, but since the Python method works, will wait for some day when we have 64 bit VEX in SOPs.

https://rhodesmill.org/skyfield/ [rhodesmill.org]
https://www.danrw.com/sgp4/ [www.danrw.com]