Hi -

Using Houdini 18.0.416 Indie, I imported an animated figure via Labs' new FBX Archive Import sop.
The figure retained its animation and texturing in the viewport.
And if I render in MPlay, things render as expected.

If I add a regular camera and distant light and try to render via the regular render tab, however, things just show up black. Tested with a Houdini cube and another figure, and was surprised to see the shadow of the problematic file show up on the cube though the character itself remains unseen.

Would appreciate any suggestions about how to proceed.

I've tried opening a new Houdini file and re-importing the fbx and get the same results.
Have tried with other fbx files and those show up normally in the viewport and render normally as well.

Also tried importing the figure with a regular File node (instead of Labs FBX Archive Import) - and the figure now shows up and renders properly, but it's not textured or animated.

I've attached images showing render in mplay versus regular render tab using the regular default mantra_ipr

Thanks for any advice.

Since it's casting shadows and occluding, that means it's rendering correctly. It looks like it's rendering all black in the material. FBX offten import with a Cd value of zero which can lead to the render appearing black.

Although FBX can import materials, they are mostly worthless and need to be rebuilt anyways. I've not used the Labs importer, it may have improvements in this regard, but in the past, the import fbx function creates rather archaic materials.

Thanks for the reply. What about the fact that things do render properly in M-Play flipbook (with correct textures applied)? Doesn't that mean fbx did successfully bring in the materials? Does M-Play reach directly to the textures while regular render tab / mantra relies on properly built materials? Thanks again for any suggestions.

If I dive into the FBX, I can see materials listed for all the parts of models - and assigning those to their respective groups doesn't change anything (entire render remains black).

If I add a stock houdini texture to a group on the fbx (like face or torso), that part will show up with the newly applied texture.

Is there an efficient way to fix imported materials if that's where the problem lies?
There are 18 different materials for this particular character and the VOP network for those materials looks too sprawling for me to try to modify without a sensible approach.

Looking inside objnet at my imported fbx I get a Red Triangle with Exclamation point and this error warning:

Error
Unable to evaluate expression (
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “<stdin>”, line 4, in expression
AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘children’
(/obj/g8beta/fbx_archive_import1/object_merge2/objpath1)).

Would that be related to why this is just rendering black?
Any suggestions on how to fix this or investigate further?

Thanks for any help.