Hi guys,

Sorry for the stupid question, but does Houdini have anything similar to Maya's “Export Selection” if you want to only export 1 objects out of many?

I tried doing a google search on this and not much comes up on “export selected Houdini”.


Regards

inside the object you want to export
place a ROP Output Driver node and connect it to the last SOP in the network
you'll see how it works from the parameter pane - and check the help card

Ah, thanks a lot for the quick answer arctor

You can also just right click on sop and Save Geometry from there.

Hi arctor,

Your solution turns out not to be so practical as first thought, as it does not export the object with it's edited scale and transforms.

SreckoM,

I've tried right click the object and look for some kind of “save” option, but in the list that pops up when you right click it, gives me no option to save it out. the closest thing I see in the list is something called “save to gallary”, your not refering to this one are you?

You need to be inside geometry node. Option is not on object level.
Here is the screenshot.
https://www.evernote.com/shard/s234/sh/073d4172-88f8-4ac3-b65f-8909345dba17/f58796582d9b239e2173b6b8cf0fda9b [evernote.com]

Hi again,

Ok I tried it, but yet again, saving geometry out like this, will not make it save any scaling or translate that you have done to the object. This means when i for instance import it back to Houdini, it will look differently.

Any suggestions anyone?

Apply your transformations at sop level instead of obj level. That way the scalings and transformations get baked into the .bgeo file.

Ah so it's never encouraged to do stuff in Object level, but instead to always only do things in SOP level. Point taken.

Thanks for the headsup.

if you transform at object level - try not to scale at object level - you can create a new geometry object and use the object_merge sop to bring in your geometry - then try RMB save, or the ROP

Sometimes you want object transforms baked in to your saved geometry for quite a few various reasons.

The procedural way is to do the original request is the following:

- Viewport hit “S” and make your geometry primitive selection.
- Viewport Tab type Group and turn your selection in to a group (makes things re-usable and easy to see what you did 6 months from now).
- Append a Blast SOP and blow away everything but your group (supply group name from above and toggle “delete non-selected”).
- Append a ROP Output Driver SOP.
- On the ROP Output Driver there's an option called “Transform”. It defaults to None. Change this “Into World Space” and now your geometry is saved to disk with the object transform applied as you requested at the beginning.

Done.

I had an old Groups To Disk SOP asset that was long on the tooth (pre-dates ForEach and is circa Houdini6.2). I re-worked it in to a more modern variant that should be quite straightforward to use.
Read the parameter tooltips as it gives you an idea as to how to set the parms for.

It takes any pre-defined primitive groups or a primitive selection (from the viewport if you wish) and when you press “Render” it writes the geometry out to disk in standard Houdini fashion.

I created a list of all the possible geometry export options as well including gzip variants. I left the ascii versions around in case you want to troll the geometry formats with a text editor if you so wish to learn how the formats are saved.

As for apprentice users, 'dunno how this will work but give it a whirl.

Oh and this supports overlapping primitives in the various groups.