Houdini reads Maya's geo cache just fine through an exported FBX, but how do I read a geo cache which has been exported seperatly from Maya? Its basically the same files, however when going through the FBX the File CHOP reads the following:

/data/geoCache/runCycle01_cache/runCycle01_unifiedCache.fbx#unifiedHen_GEO, vertexcache, cachedouble

How could I modify that expression to read the cache directly, and from any other location?

No one knows?

I might know, but I was on vacation until today, so sorry for the delay.

Unfortunately, you can't read a cache file on its own, without a corresponding FBX file. The reason for this is that the only way for us to get access to the vertex cache data is to go through the FBX SDK supplied by Autodesk, which needs to load in the entire FBX file and create a proper hierarchy of nodes and their attributes to be imported by us.

Out of curiosity, how do you get a cache exported separately? Doesn't a cache always apply to a particular object?

Well, vacation is vacation.

To bad, is there any native geometry cache format in Houdini which I could export my cache to from CHOP's and then re-import? I have a feeling that going through the FBX does require some unnecessary calculations. And there are already quite a lot of “per object calculations” for my roughly 10.000 animated objects.

In Maya there is a import/export cache functionality which imports/exports cache to/from the selected object. Our pipe is quite depending on geometry caches and being able to use them easily in Houdini would really help the integration of Houdini into the pipe.

Bump!

I am looking for the exact same issue. Does anyone know a way to read Maya cache+geo files without an existing FBX?


thanks

Hi there

Bit late in the day but thought I'd add to this thread

one solution I have been using is to use the KP point cache tools (supported by maya and xsi) to write pc2 files

There is a pc2 reader for houdini available on the forums


Of course this is all been supeceded by alembic these days