Hi!

I am attempting to extract the vertex weights and, more specifically, bone bindings from an input mesh and input rig, similar to the Houdini FBX import. I was curious if this is currently possible using HEngine in Maya?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Unfortunately, that's not possible at the moment. Only the end mesh is being transferred into Houdini Engine.

If the joints are being animated, the resulting deformation of each frame does get inputted into the asset. However, the joint/skin information is not available.

do you think skin weights is something one day we could pass in/out as an attribute? I think this would be quite interesting to see some of the stuff we could do if we were passing these attributes through…

Hm, just off the top of my head, it's hard to tell. If the plugin simply passes the skin weight as an attribute into Houdini Engine, and doesn't actually perform the skin deformation on Houdini Engine side, it may be quite possible. But without the bone information, I'm not sure how useful this would be.

For outputting back into Maya, it's more tricky. Assuming the bones already exist in the scene, the plugin would have to setup skinning with the output weights. I guess this might be possible? The workflow would seem a bit messy though.

Yes, it is possible. And I am working on it.
KineFX has its own data structure, and so do Maya.
However it is doable to export maya skincluster data into a xml or json file, and read it in Houdini with python. Everything is pure text so I think it will work.