+1
Right now going the moi3d-route.

Maybe the labs team could be the right people to ask for importers and organisation tools for cad files.

Some kind of Cad importer sounds nice, but Houdini doesn't even play nice with basic FBX files currently. One has to jump through a lot of hoops to export FBX files properly.

Does anyone know if there's any improvement in that department in 19 ?

yes, reading a CAD/step file in houdini is necessary

Now that Epic has a financial stake in Sidefx, Datasmith would be a good option for Houdini.
It can convert a lot of CAD formats.
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/datasmith [www.unrealengine.com]

In the meantime you can use Unreal Engine with Datasmith for the conversion ....

I'm coming from 3ds max and that is what I'm using to convert my step files to fbx but my target is totally replace 3ds max.
Things like not having a proper CAD importer are what make me being stuck between max and Houdini.

We need this, SideFX.

+1

I will escalate this to have more Surfaces operations possible in Houdini which will perfectly make sense in a procedural context. Trim, join, fillet... As we are living at a time where the big buy the small, maybe Sidefx could pass an agreement with MOI software developer. A brilliant little piece of software which the best cad converter too actually

Yes, MOI. Use it all the time to convert step files.

+1 for a CAD import. Ideally one which would allow to access the hierarchy and attributes before tessellating so we could set up rules based on names, materials and bounding boxes for individual LOD's... And then of course importing everything as packed/instanced Geo...

I also looked into Unreal/Datasmith to replace 3dsmax which works quite okay.
The biggest downside with fbx import is that we lose the instancing. A workaround for that is USD which UE can do via plugin. But as far as I can tell, it's necessary to wrangle the metadata from LOP to SOP in order to get the correct referenced USD assets - in case you want to reestablish some kind of instancing on SOP level for further optimization (it seems like Houdini does an internal enumeration which screw's up the naming of the USD prims (meaning the path and name attribute is useless, especially when the source CAD objects end with a digit...)... - here is some more on how to do that: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/82054/?page=1#post-353069 [www.sidefx.com]

A +100 from me.
I'm a new user, working mainly in product visualisation and being able to import common CAD data formats such as STEP is central to a lot of stuff that I do.

Ironic that a Canadian software company supports USD over CAD

Same here ! +1000
Put me on the waiting list for a proper way to import CAD objects

I'm totally new to Houdini. But now, as i feel confident to actually do my first projects with it, the only thing that's really missing for me, is the possibility to import CAD data. If that would be possible, i would switch my workflow to Houdini in a heartbeat.

Chipping in as well to ask for a CAD import / Datasmith integration, also expanding the current nurbs toolset would be awesome as well as natively supporting CAD formats to import as curves.

It does require you to have a MOI license (comes free with Octane!), but using this HDA you can import step etc files directly from within Houdini using MOI meshing (which is amazing) under the hood. This also opens the door for batch processing of step files using PDG etc.


(Does currently only work for Windows, but should be fairly easy to adapt for apple)

Uploaded it to Orbolt for non-indie users: https://orbolt.com/asset/dom::Moi3DCADImporter::1.5

Imagine having Plasticity fully integrated in houdini procedural node system...

HandcraftedMedia
but using this HDA you can import step etc files directly from within Houdini

Do you happen to know if after doing some work on an imported step file, will the asset allow you to export as a step file with the modified changes?

Hello, Dom's HDA is not a .stp importer, it's a .stp mesher (or other format supported by MoI, like .igs, .3dm). Once the asset is in Houdini you deal with polygones, no Nurbs geometry, so there is no way to save it back in .stp.

Just saying +1 to this. I sent a RFE a while back too. Really hope to see it natively built into Houdini.
I work with engineering/manufacturing models all day, and really wish I didn't have to go through 3dsMax every time I need to import a step file.

Uploaded the Moi importer to Orbolt for non-indie users:
https://orbolt.com/asset/dom::Moi3DCADImporter::1.5