Sharing files among Houdini,Maya,3DMAX,Softimage,Electricimage.

[nimbo]

Can anyone tell me if there is a way to import .hip files
in to those four programs listed above?
Thanks

[thenice]

Not directly, but I imagine at any 3d app with core level scripting would be able to read a scene exported from Houdini via scripting. Houdini also has support for .RIB files so you might try importing that way (with MAX you'd use MAXman).

[ddb44]

If you're looking to export geometry, then all you have to do is right click on the SOP you want to export and save it out as an .obj or whatever you need. Exporting animation channels is a whole other problem, and I've never dealt with it personally.

Hope this helps a little.

-Tim Townsend
Digital Animation
Centennial College

[ivan-dewolf]

you can get data from those packages into Houdini with Martian Glue... (www.martin-labs.com)

In reply to:
Can anyone tell me if there is a way to import .hip files
in to those four programs listed above?
Thanks

[3dani]

As far as I can tell, Martian Glue just offers a RIB importer which means that it doesn't do anything for animation unless I export out every single frame as a RIB.

[ivan-dewolf]

well, yes you do have to write out a rib file for every frame. Glue then imports the geometry, cameras, lights, shader strings and attributes on a per-frame basis. That means that anything that is animated in the original package is also animated inside Houdini. If you want access to your animation as channels, you can dump your sequence into a geometry CHOP. If your geometry is static and the camera animates, just read in the geometry once, and write out a sequence of ribs with the geometry turned off for the animating camera. If you are able to write out a single frame as a rib, why wouldn't you be able to write out a sequence of ribs for animation?

[3dani]

ivan_dewolf said:

If you are able to write out a single frame as a rib,
why wouldn't you be able to write out a sequence of
ribs for animation?

It's not so much that we wouldn't be able to but as to whether we want to. If I'm not mistaken, importing into a geometry chop means that I lose the ability to shift
keys around. Importing entire scenes through RIBs also mean losing rig information so that characters wouldn't be posable in Houdini.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure Martian Glue is a great RIB importer. Ideally, a Maya scene importer would be best, retaining as much as possible. Note the "ideally" clause.

dante

[ivan-dewolf]

true enough, but a full maya scene importer would have a few problems. First of all, it would only work for Maya, glue works with any software. Second, things work a little differently in houdini, and it would be effectively impossible to exactly implement 100% of all functionality of the maya scene in houdini. cheats and hacks can get it most of the way there, but which cheats and which hacks gets very complex.

As far asa using glue to get rig information from a character setup, you could indeed do it with a lot of careful hscripting and naming conventions in Maya. It wouldn't be easy, though. and no moving the keyframes, true.
But who's going to start keyframing in maya and then finish keyframing in Houdini?

[3dani]

Aren't we offtopic here since the original post wanted to export hip files?