Quick question on exporting .abc;

What would be Houdini's equivalent to Maya's ‘locator objects’ is when exporting to Alembic?

Apparently when importing Alembic files into Nuke, from Maya, locator objects import as Axis nodes. I'd like to export from Houdini with similar locators.

Thanks!

I have no idea, but importing a Maya locator into Houdini via fbx gives you a Null

If you export your scene via (File->Export->Alembic..) and import it in the Maya ,Then you have some empty groups with transformation's data exactly like Locators

Cheers Skybar/Joker386. Looks like Nuke treats Maya locators specially and can break them into Axes.

Yes, exactly , but there is no problem here ,Because The locators basicaly is a locator shape inside of simple group just to see 3D position in the viewport !

Maybe a checkbox on the Alembic render node that says 'Write Transforms as Maya Locators“ would work.

The Alembic Surface node already has:

”Load Maya Locator
Test for transform nodes which match how Maya saves out locater nodes and load these into Houdini."

I know this topic is old, but it is a good one. I need to generate locators for nuke. I can export transform data that will come into maya as an empty group, but nuke can't see them. Needs to be an alembic with out extra manual steps in nuke (off the shelf nuke geoRead node).

Surely there has been some development on this as it would be useful to pass null transform information to maya or nuke or other packages.

Thanks in advance.

robau
I know this topic is old, but it is a good one. I need to generate locators for nuke. I can export transform data that will come into maya as an empty group, but nuke can't see them. Needs to be an alembic with out extra manual steps in nuke (off the shelf nuke geoRead node).

Surely there has been some development on this as it would be useful to pass null transform information to maya or nuke or other packages.

Thanks in advance.

Did you ever find a solution to this? From the nuke documentation, it seems like it should work, but my houdini nulls will not import in nuke as axis or from the readgeo node.

smbell
From the nuke documentation, it seems like it should work, but my houdini nulls will not import in nuke as axis or from the readgeo node.

It's not nuke's problem (for once), Houdini simply does not export nulls like that. There have been long standing RFEs for this, but so far, it's unsolved.

We work around the problem like this:
- make an empty geo in Houdini, merge all the Nulls' center points into it.
- Export that, read into Nuke via ReadGeo. Now you have a bunch of points in Nuke.
- Using a little python script inside Nuke, loop over the points, grab their position, and create Axes nodes accordingly


This works well for markers on maps and stuff like that. Would need to be more elaborate if this has to serve rigging purposes of some kind.

If Alembic is not mandatory, FBX works fine for transferring nulls from Houdini to Nuke. You just have to load it into Axis node, which is not super convenient if you have many locators, but I suppose it could be automated.