HI Folks -

Houdini Newbie here, trying to complete my 30 day eval of Houdini for our studio over the next couple days. Forgive me if my questions are obvious and feel free to point me to docs/videos - I haven't had time to read them all.

Questions on exporting - I need to use other tools for our workflow, namely Blender/Maya/Unity so trying to export OBJ. So...

- There's no geometry export at the top/scene level from the File level like I would expect, only Alembic/Filmbox/GLTF which I'm not familiar with. Should I be? Are these useful?

- At the geometry node level, I can right-click and Save Geometry but the dialog doesn't let me navigate to a directory, I have to input it manually and then my file never gets exported, I can't find the obj file. There's no confirmation of successful export, but no error either. My last node is a Boolean node, can I only export from certain nodes?

This all seems a bit clunky for what is standard operation in most 3D modeling tools, please let me know if I'm missing some things.

John

Output is typically handled with nodes in Houdini. The nodes for output are called ROPs or render operators. To output geometry, use a geometry ROP. To output an fbx or alembic, use the corresponding node. Many of the export nodes have corresponding geometry nodes for export from the geometry level.

Geometry export doesn't exist for the scene level, because Geometry is contained within objects. Only scene exports can export from the scene level, such as fbx or alembic.

I don't recommend using obj for export to tools such as maya or blender. It's antiquated ascii format and does not support many of the features needed to losslessly transfer scene data between packages. FBX, Alembic, or now USD are more preferential as they can represent not just geometry, but scene concepts such as transforms and object segmentation.

To export to a specific folder, clicking the icon highlighted in the screenshot will open a file browser. Manually typing in the location is an option if you use the full structure or know how to use $HIP, $JOB etc.