Maya Camera to Houdini

[goggle]

I know this has been asked here many times before. But I took a slightly different approach to it. But still ran into problems. Perhaps someone else can expand on it.

OK, so I've got this camera in Maya and I'd like to import it into Houdini.
And yes I know about Alien Glue but I can't justify the expense to my producer yet.
Also don't have time to learn Houdin .cmd files. That's a whole other story.

What I tried to do is use the jShowPathWin script from Highend here to turn the camera's animation into a path. (One CV per frame) I then exported that path as a RIB. I then imported the RIB file into Houdini. I then attached a Houdini Camera to that path. worked good.

Or so I thought. Rotated out of control. So I parented a locator to my Maya Camera at about 5 units distance and then wrote it's animation out as a path in the same manner. Attached a Houdini locator to that path and had the Houdini camera 'lookAt' that locator. That worked great. Most of the rotations transferred.

Now what I can't figure out is why my Houdini camera is rolling along it's path. Even though it's still 'lookingAt' it's locator.

So where is this rolling coming from and how would I get rid of it? Has anyone sucessfully done this sort of thing before?

-James

[gdc]

It's been a while since I've used Houdini, but I seem to remember having this problem once befor. If I remember correctly, Houdini's camera has a "roll" parameter, which I had to either set to 0 or animate it so the camera didn't roll. Anyway it may be worth looking for this setting.
--g

[nihilists]

It's quite easy to export the Maya camera to houdini and vice-versa. We've doing on every production without any problem. If your camera it's animated,
first download this mel script :

http://www.odforce.net/downloads/tools/chandump.mel

And use it to export Maya animation curves to houdini raw data channel, if you have animated the focal lenght too you need to connect that channel to a dummy object to export (I use a locator and connect the focal lenght to the X translate of the locator...).
If your camera don't move, just copy the values from maya to houdini.
Then you have to convert the maya horizontal film aperture (misured in decimal inches) to houdini(measured in millimeters). Just divide the maya value for something like 0.0396825 and you will get the houdini aperture.
Hope it helps you.
Alex Ongaro

[goggle]

That most definitely helped. It's exactly what I was trying to do. You rock. My life will be so much easier now. I've always felt that Maya and Houdini should play well together. They each do such different things so well.

And, thank you for clueing me into a new Houdini website. They're so rare.

-James

[goggle]

Yeah, I checked into the 'roll' channel. I felt that trying to key it would be too innacurate. You know how twitchy camera moves can be. If they're not exactly on everything looks funky and you may not know it until compositing.

But I did find a solution with the help of another poster. This is why I love Highend3d.

Thank you for your help.

-James