derrick
It sounds like you are encountering a performance bug in Maya's Alembic importer. “Face set” is basically the Alembic term for a “group”. Your geometry contains primitive groups called “glass_concentricoutside”, “glass_radialinside”, “glass_radialoutside”, “inside”, and “outside” (these become face sets in the Alembic archive). The “abcecho” command line tool can help you determine what is actually stored in an Alembic archive.

Thanks! That abcecho tool looks helpful. Maya claims they are aware of the bug and it's possible that Maya 2019 has fixed it….

Hi,

I ran across an “interesting” problem whilst exporting a fractured geo from Houdini to Maya as an alembic.

When I fracture the geo into 150 pieces, the alembic takes 11 seconds to load into Maya.
However when I fracture it into 675 pieces, the alembic takes 3 minutes to load into Maya.
If I fracture it into a very high number, Maya just hangs when I try to load the alembic.

Is this a Maya or Houdini issue??

I'm exporting with the build Hierarchy checked and packed transform set to transform geometry, which gives me separate objects with transforms in Maya.

It looks like setting Face sets to “No Face Sets” in the alembic rop may help this but I'm still working on this, and I don't even know what a face set is…

I've attached the alembic files if anybody wants to check them out!

Eric

I agree. The whole attribute/variable mapping thing is extremely confusing and unintuitive to me and I really hope it's overhauled sometime in the future.

Sorry to be negative - for the most part Houdini is great and the sidefx folks have always been very helpful and knowledgable.

Eric

The friendly folks at sidefx just sent me a workaround in case anyone's interested!

Cheers,

Eric


————————————————————–
As a workaround, please:
1) Turn on SPH style particles, instead of plain particles, in the flipfluidobject. This will allow particle coordinates to be created at all.

2) Add a Gas Adjust Particle Coordinates to the particle update stage of the flip solver.

Anyone there? Bueller? Bueller??

Eric

Hi!

First of all the Flip Fluids, insofar as I can tell are really awesome. However I'm trying to use the coordinate system feature, and when I try it on the default flip fluids using the coordinate system tab in the flipfluid1 node, it doesn't work - to see the coordinates I use the Guides option, set visualization type to value and visualization attrib to coordinate1, and I can't see texture coords. And the attribute doesn't show in the details view.

However when I use the coordinate system feature on the particle fluids, it works just like you'd expect. Also when I take a flip fluid, go into the particle fluid object and under Initial Data I change the Particle Type to SPH, it works!

But this is kind of wonky.

Am I missing something?

Eric

Yeah now that I think it makes sense that FBX might be causing the problem since $HIP is correct.
I'm using version Houdini 11.0.504 and FBX 200900; I'll try and upgrade and see if that fixes things

Thanks a lot for the answers guys I think I've figured it out -

It looks like it's a Windows path problem!! Houdini and fbx are absolved of responsibility yet again…. Our directory structure contains some nasty path mapping that seems to be throwing Houdini off. (like server names, whatever, I'm not network savvy enough to know all of that stuff)

So when I point the export location to $HIP (which is on our network filesystem), it's able to create the fpc directory but somehow not the .fbx file.

However when I export to directories on the Local Drive, it works fine! I guess it's the fact that it's a nice neat path like C:\ that works. It's funny because everybody warns me about working on my local drive but now I have to….

So in summary, Houdini is still in my cool book, and Windows is still
@#$@-ed up. Anybody else run into this and want to vent?
Eric

One thing I forgot to mention; I'm using Houdini Escape; maybe that makes a difference….

Hi!

I'm a casual Houdini user and I'm just trying to do something very simple - export deforming geometry to Maya - I did an export and it creaetd an fpc directory with an MC and XML files in it but no fbx file! So Maya could not read it as far as I know.

Then I tried exporting the simplest thing I could (a polygon sphere with no animation) to FBX and it refused to write anything!

What's wrong? Am I being lame and forgetting something really simple??

Houdini is a great package from a great company but there are sometimes basic things that are very hard to learn how to do for non-hard-core users like myself…

Eric

Awesome. Thanks!

I'd like to transfer attributes such as color and density from a fluid (like a pyro sim) to the nearest particles or points, just like how attrib transfer works. Anybody know a straightforward (preferrably) or even a convoluted way of doing this?

The purpose of this is to combine sprites with fluids to get a nice smoke/fire effect that starts off as a fluid, and transitions into sprites.

Transferring velocity is straightforward; however I'd like to use the color of the flames to drive the sprite color, and fade in the sprites as the fluid fades out.

Cheers,

Eric

Hi,

I'm testing exporting geometry/camera from maya to houdini is a dae_fbx. The fbx file I exported is called $HIP/s030_11.dae but when I do the houdini import it sets the file name to:

$HIP/s030_11.dae#pCylinder1,convertoff

This gives it an error so it locks the node. It looks like it's trying to extract only the cylinder geometry from the file. If I change it to $HIP/s030_11.dae it works but only gets one object from the file.

Anybody know what's going on? I've never done this before so I might be making some basic mistakes.

I'm surprised there aren't more docs on converting from Maya to Houdini since it's done very often but is full of pitfalls… javascript:emoticon(':cry:')

Thanks!

Eric

Free Intro to Houdini class Wed. April 15 in Santa Monica,
From 7:30 PM to 9:30 PM

To find out about this class click here:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1472&Itemid=215 [sidefx.com]

or go to the main sidefx.com page and find:
LA: Intro To Houdini

This class will cover an all new example.

About me:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ericrosenthal [linkedin.com]

Please only register if you are definitely going to show up.
And please be on time - This is LA so traffic will probably be bad!

Eric

Free Intro to Houdini class Sat. March 21 in Santa Monica,
From 11 AM to 12:30 PM

To find out about this class click here:

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1460&Itemid=215 [sidefx.com]

or go to the main sidefx.com page and find:
LA: Houdini 9.5 Quickstart

Please only register if you are definitely going to show up.

Eric

I'm considering using Houdini (instead of xfrog) for an animation of a tree growing. I'd probably use L-systems like in the tutorials at
http://www.cmivfx.com/ [cmivfx.com]

Can I model and render a tree growing using Houdini Escape,
or do I have to (gulp!) get the full Master version?

Thanks,

Eric