Hi,
A survey: what are folks using for taking animating (constant-topology) polygonal and patch meshes out to Maya and back again? I'm interested in being able to do the round-trip easily and repeatedly. And what about more sophisticated constructs, e.g. bone chain or multiple objects simultaneously?

Thanks,

– Antoine

I'm trying to figure out the same thing with Max myself. With Maya it might be a little easier since Maya is all about .obj format. You might be able to do an .obj sequence with a mel script etc. Real Flow's free plugins might also work for the animated stuff.

With the still things most common format's should work

With the bones all I've heard about is collada but I haven't really looked into it.

Someone here actually wrote a bgeo I/O system for Maya. If you've gotta cache something out of Maya - it may as well be in a format others can use…

we have a similar utility. You pretty much have to write your own do this sort of thing. the only default geometry type they both share is obj and you have to be aware of the winding differences of the vertices from package to package. even then you have limitations with primitive groups.
-k

I've written a few of these export/import/convertor tools now and it's not so bad. Geo is a really easy format to work with. The most difficult part I found was working with Maya's API, that and deciding how much information I really need to include. If you want to include rigs, not just baked animation frames, things get complicated quickly.

With Maya 8.5 and H9 supporting Python, this sort of thing should be much easier. I've written Houdini<->Maya importers and exporters in C++, a geo->Direct X convertor in C#, a geo parsing library for a PRMan DSO, a Massive to Houdini particle caching DSO, and Perl script that converted from a proprietary ascii format to geo.

Unfortunately I don't own any of them except the Direct X convertor, which is working for my purposes but I don't think anyone else will find it useful. It's one way out of Houdini and into other applications, just a step above OBJ. It stores geometry, normals, a single UV set, multiple texture and material assignments, and baked animation frames in a single X file. When Houdini 9 comes out I intend to write something new but it's going to be geared at game development.

Geometry, both mesh and NURBS is pretty straight foward and well documented in Houdini. There's a sample in the installation directory somewhere that will generate a geo file with every possible feature and surface type included. For export all you need to do is collect the relevant info and write it out to a formatted text geo file. Reading it back in is a bit more difficult because you have to deal with the peculiarities of whatever software you are trying to load the data into.

If there's anything I can do to help let me know.

Yes, we have a GEO exporter/reader for Maya too, though it's going to be replaced with a better one in the (hopefully) near future.

A chap at Filmakademie has written an OBJ Sequence importer for Maya. Writing a sequence of OBJs from Maya is easy, 3 lines of Mel

As mentioned, OBJs are very limited (single UV set for example).

http://www.subsites.org/231.0.html [subsites.org]

Cheers,

Peter B

pbowmar
Yes, we have a GEO exporter/reader for Maya too, though it's going to be replaced with a better one in the (hopefully) near future.

A chap at Filmakademie has written an OBJ Sequence importer for Maya. Writing a sequence of OBJs from Maya is easy, 3 lines of Mel

As mentioned, OBJs are very limited (single UV set for example).

http://www.subsites.org/231.0.html [subsites.org]

Cheers,

Peter B

So has pretty much everyone written their own? Sure seems that way. Can one even *buy* a solution anywhere?

Antoine Durr
So has pretty much everyone written their own? Sure seems that way. Can one even *buy* a solution anywhere?

Sure you could buy one. You just would have to pay a programmer who knows Maya's API to write you one.

Spec one out. Tell us what features you'd want supported and what version of Maya you are using. Maybe someone can help.

MichaelC

Antoine Durr
So has pretty much everyone written their own? Sure seems that way. Can one even *buy* a solution anywhere?

Sure you could buy one. You just would have to pay a programmer who knows Maya's API to write you one.

Spec one out. Tell us what features you'd want supported and what version of Maya you are using. Maybe someone can help.

Sorry, meant off the shelf. I can write one myself, it's just that I don't particularly want to.

Hey Antoine,
I've been dealing with the exact same issue. I am currently using sequences of OBJs but I would definitely like to move onto a better transport format. TweakFilms and DNeg use GTO as their geometry format between packages from what I hear:

http://www.tweakfilms.com/main/twk3_gto.html [tweakfilms.com]

I know of others like Juck @ TheMonk who are looking into PointOven, but I'm not sure if that supports Houdini out of the box:

http://www.ef9.com/ef9/PO1.5/PointOven_15.html [ef9.com]

We may be looking into moving to a GTO based format ourselves at some point in the future, the idea would be to use that for geometry import/export between XSI, Maya and Houdini… I'll keep you posted if we made some headway.

It really is a shame all this custom coding is only good for studios. It means Houdini isn't really suitable for the individuals who model and UV in a different package (like modo).
It actually is a bit baffling that Houdini doesn't support a more “universal” filetype like FBX or LWO. Obj is all well and good, but it has serious limitations with it's single UV set.

I think this definitely has some potential, I just wish it could be made for Houdini as well.

http://www.ef9.com/ef9/PO1.5/PointOven_15.html [ef9.com]

Maybe with enough requests it will be (I've already requested)

http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=5895&hl=point+oven [forums.odforce.net]

Hey Antoine,

I know this is an oldie, but this new technology looks exciting:

http://www.alembic.io/ [alembic.io]

Definitely keep an eye on it…

http://a-vfx.ru/en/products_en/inhousetools [a-vfx.ru]

Maya-XSI-MAX-Houdini pipeline tool

This is a really old thread. Since then, Houdini has added FBX and MDD file support.