paunevado

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