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I am trying to export Houdini15 particles data to Maya2015 particles.

So the basic idea is

  1. Create a particles in Houdini
  2. Save particles data to disc
  3. Read particles data in Maya

the particle data should include position, particleId, age, velocity and custom_attributes... etc.

I want to create Maya PDC files from Houdini particles data.

Rajiv Sharma
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3 Answers3

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I think its not that really simple and the best is using some tools which is able to do this, Sony open sourced F3d https://github.com/imageworks/Field3D and https://github.com/gearslogy/GParticlesIO also can do this I think . Hope this helps

Achayan
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You can try this to take your Houdini particles to Maya.

  1. write all particles data to .bgeo file.
  2. create a file sop digital asset in houdini.
  3. read that .hda file in Maya through Houdini Engine.
  4. select .bgeo sequence and reload digital asset.

This will create a Nparticles system in maya and you can see your custom attributes.

Alex
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There are better ways to store point clouds than Maya cache (as has been pointed out by previous answers), but if you are really interested in doing this, you can check this paper: http://100cells.com/downloads/MayaCacheDLL/MayaCacheBitstreamDocumentation.pdf

There you can find a description of the Maya cache file format (obtained by reverse engineering) so you can develop your own Maya cache exporter in Houdini. I did a prototype using Python and it works. You can export any custom attributes you want but It's important that you create attributes in Houdini that are always needed for Maya:

  • position
  • count (special Int channel with just one point size, representing the point count)
  • id (don't remember if it's mandatory)

For rendering with motion blur I think it crashes if there is no velocity channel, but it may depend on the renderer. You should open a genuine Maya cache file in an hex editor and see what channels are exported in a working cache file. Also take a look at the XML if you are doing multifile caches, as you will need to create it too (at least this is simpler than the binary cache files).

You can find a C library here: https://github.com/100cells/Maya-Cache-DLL-Project maybe it's not the best implementation to use in Houdini but can be usefull as a reference.

ciclopez
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