How can you export a scene, collada or fbx?
Is there a place where there are already scripts ?

Is there someone who has already had the good sense to do a script for export a scene?

Do not tell me that for over $ 7000. We did not export to another soft. :evil:

It's frustrating!

Well I really like how to work with houdini, toooo bad! I must therefore animate character in another software. I am freelance and I am not multi-billionaire.
In this case I will see at XSI. It's less funny to make 3D into xsi, but at least I can leave my data into a real-time engine like Quest3d.
I make also “real time” and therefore it is important to be able to leave the data in collada or fbx.


Will there be a function export in the next version of houdini?


I grieve :cry:
I am not a programmer!!

I agree, for some of us that would like to use Houdini at a small studio or as freelancers it is too difficult or time consuming to write our own exporters. Seems to me that sidefx wants to appeal to a broader audience (example: the Cartoon character rig), and a great way to do this is to help them migrate their projects to houdini (and maybe export them back to their package of choice if needed).

well I disagree, true if you dont know programming it will be hard to write an exporter. But as a TD, I just wrote one using FBX in 2 days ( I didnt a thing about FBX 3 days ago ). Although I ve seen studios spending months to the same thing.

Maybe they (SESI) want to convince you to try Houdini also in other fields - not just effects animation. Instead of trying to export from Houdini - try import into it . Hey, it works!


cheers,
sy.

I think the death of any application is it's inability to communicate with other programs (the outside world), even if those programs are the competition.

Hopefully collada export is in the works.

I think that's a great point, Andrew.
More than ever regular users are starting to realize that they can afford to use a suite of different programs to attack a project.

If found it's not difficult at all to write an exporter for Houdini 9 using Python. The problem I find, is that Houdini is such a departure from other applications in the way that it represents the scene data and in what a scene may contain that determining what data is important to the exporter can be incredibly difficult. It's not as simple as just walking the network and writing out a mesh and bone information and some lights and a camera. I don't envy the person who ends up trying to write a Collada exporter at SideFX. It's going to be an absolutely infuriating task, and it's a project that will probably never end.

Since Houdini does cater to a more technical crowd, I would probably expect Houdini to end up being more of a collada authoring tool than a simple import export utility.

It wouldn't be unreasonable to have the user designate certain variables, or roots of certain hirarchies if the functions of collada depended on them, that way unsupported functions wouldn't be an issue, but I'm sure it's not that simple from a programming perspective.

If the exporter forces the user to be explicit about what is being exported it makes things much easier, but even then there's a lot that can wrong, so you end up wrting a tool that forces a user to be explicit AND format their scene a certain way. That's fine if you are in a studio where there is a prescribed workflow, but it's going to fall over quickly and often out in the wild.

I wrote an exporter for Houdini that will export meshes, capture rig hierarchies, vertex animation, bone transforms, particles and simple material information to a custom XML format for a personal game project. It didn't take long at all, however it has pretty limited capabilities and it forces a certain workflow. It forces users to remember to do things like not delete their capture attributes (which Houdini does by default), forces users to use a custom Material HDA, forces users to use takes… etc.

Collada is great; it supports a lot of information, however there are fundamental features of Houdini I'm not so sure Collada can represent in the current spec. MetaCapture for instance; Assuming you could write metacapture data to Collada, is there any piece of third party software available that can parse that data in a meaningful way?

I'm not down on the idea of a Collada exporter here. I just know it's going to require a considerable ammount of effort, so I don't think anyone should fault SideFX for the lack of support for Collada export at this time. In fact, I'd be willing to try to repurpose my little game exporter for Collada. My only concern is that SideFX might not be too happy about someone making available such an exporter that was fully funtional with Apprentice.

all very true I think

However, I think it would be pretty easy to justify Houdini at the front of many pipelines as long as there was a good and open collada connection.

Yeah, but old habits die hard. I feel like Houdini could support every file format known to makind and people would still insist on using Maya for rigging and animation. You might be able to win previz and layout with a Collada exporter but those animators and riggers are a tough nut to crack. They don't know a superior product when they see one :twisted:

Houdini is as great for the interface and for FX:
For how much longer! Competition arrives

Modeling is good, but not exceptional.
Animated characters: it's not xsi or motionbuilder.
:cry:

Export and plugins: Have to be computer engineer, It is very current, with software compagny, We can do this with our program but Suffice it to be programmed in pyton or c + +……

I speak here for others programs:
It's easy: we do demos that kills. But it does not say to you quíl need a programmer team.

no plugins for Vue désprit, fbx, collada, movimento, quest3d, realflow …………. So before using houdini, start by learning a programmer for make export if it is possible.

In this case there are cheaper for more comprehensive programs and
More open to the outside.

sorry for my bad english

on the other hand,

It would be much better to do the whole file format and conversion thing “well” than to do a cheapy fix for a few users.

I know there could be lots of issues but I think Houdini's workflow would be ideal for such tasks, especially with the procedural rendering of many node types, as well as the flexible skinning / hierarchy features, python, and superior interaction with operating systems.

Even if the end result was similar to the end result in maya export to collada etc, Houdini would have much more flexibility the the creation process, and adapt to changes much more readily. Think about how easy it is to procedurally generate rigs in Houdini compared to other apps.

Hey! Remember an old Alias|Wavefront ad?

“Houdini is not a piece of software, it's a way of life”


:twisted: