Hello,



I am currently using Houdini for a group project for university; making a Lego-styled animated short. Our pipeline was to model, rig and animate in Maya, then import the pre-animated scenes to Houdini and create materials and render from there. ​

The thing is, I am a Houdini newbie and, since we started learning Houdini as we advanced with the project, I could not foresee the issues with this pipeline;

I have no idea on how to import animated scenes from Maya to Houdini.

I tried importing the maya animations with Alembic, but alembic does not save material information (or at least I haven't found how), which made assigning materials on scenes with multiple geometries way harder.

So, I tried with FBXs. FBXs have this thing "shop_materialpath", which holds the material information assigned on Maya. Using this, I can quickly connect materials to their corresponding geometries.
But, I have not found a good way to correctly import animated FBXs into Houdini. The only way I could get the FBX to actually be animated was by importing it through the File > Import > Filmbox FBX, but this creates an enormous (and very scary) net of nodes that I just don't know how to manage.

Sadly, FBXs imported using a File node don't seem to keep the animation information for me. I don't know if there is an actual way to import animated fbx using the File node (and if there is, how?) or if I could use another node/method to import my animated scenes, so that:

1- It is clean and efficient (preferably through a single node for the whole scene, like using a File node)
2- It keeps the material information (so we can quickly connect Houdini's materials to Maya's)
3- Of course, it keeps the animation information.

Sorry for this long wall of text; I wanted to make it as detailed as possible. I might have not used the correct names for some stuff, I hope there are no misunderstandings.
I would attach a hip file, but I don't have anything I can show but random experiments I don't really understand myself.
Thanks

Did you try to bake the FBX prior to export? The animation should be ok with importing in Houdini, and you don't need to look at all the nodes if you don't want to. Just put them in a subnet (see attached file).

Just to make sure your issue is with Houdini rather than Maya, you might want to try downloading the free ancient warrior fbx from turbo squid (https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-free-ancient-warriors-model-1774517). There are a couple minor tweaks to this in Houdini to get it to work right, but the animation from fbx comes over fine (Mantra jpg sequence compiled in Davinci Resolve): https://vimeo.com/661370666 [vimeo.com] . The results are similar to that in Blender and Modo: https://vimeo.com/661535519 [vimeo.com] and https://vimeo.com/661653390 [vimeo.com] .

Personally, I would construct the lego set in Houdini. It is much easier than in Maya, as you can use procedural modeling to your advantage. Moving the render into Houdini does not make a lot of sense, unless you want to use liquids, particles, etc. Mantra will be very slow for you, compared to Arnold. If you want to see speed differences, render the demo warrior fbx in Houdini Mantra, Blender Eevee, and Arnold and you will see what I mean. Even 3dlight will be slow compared with Eevee or Arnold. Mantra is very stable and can use point colors, attributes, and other Houdini specific features but for your needs, I don't see any advantage. So I would model in Houdini and consider rendering in something else, rather than the other way around.

Note that Houdini is very particular about pointers to referenced textures and objects, so whatever is built into the fbx will likely require changing the location reference in Houdini. It is often easier to just create a few principled shaders in Houdini and relink to the texture images and then assign these materials to various groups or objects rather than try to fix all the mismatched file references.