Hi, I have tried to import several times from Illustrator (EPS, Legacy, etc.), and I always get the black surface. I have read other topics with the same situation and not solution. Please, how do you fix it?

Any ideas?

It might be best if you can submit a bug for this, and attach a simple .ai or .eps file to go with it. I don't know too much about our eps support. I did try some simple cases (not generated from Adobe Illustrator), and they seem to import ok. I've attached a simple example.

EPS is pretty complicated to import, so it's entirely possible that there are things that we don't support correctly. Illustrator's does seem to have several options for selecting versions. Have you tried using some older/simpler exporting option?

Same here,

from AI I've exported a vector version 8, which usually is the most compatible version for 3d apps, but I'm getting the same black issue.

awong
It might be best if you can submit a bug for this, and attach a simple .ai or .eps file to go with it. I don't know too much about our eps support. I did try some simple cases (not generated from Adobe Illustrator), and they seem to import ok. I've attached a simple example.

EPS is pretty complicated to import, so it's entirely possible that there are things that we don't support correctly. Illustrator's does seem to have several options for selecting versions. Have you tried using some older/simpler exporting option?

What software did you use to generate that EPS?

After a very basic test, it seems it works fine from Inkscape.
From AI it doesn't matter what version or format I choose, it always comes with the black filled surface.

So, the workaround for now could be exporting an SVG from AI to Inkscape and then saving this back to EPS. But, yes, this needs to be fixed.

I was going to start a new topic on this issue…but yes, I have here the same issues after importing Ai files (saved the .ai file in version 08, to eliminate compression, etc).

Black filled surface, and to be honest the primitive created is not very clean.
Maybe this is a noob question, but is there anyway to extract just the curve from an illustrator file rather than the resulting primitive?

Hi everyone!
I just started with Houdini so I feel a little bit embarrassed about the way i think I fixed the black surface. It seems that Houdini when importing .ai files add a black color to the pimitives. So just add a color node, make it white, to your imported file and your preview will be nicer. Or delete the attribute Cd from the primitives.

Or you could just ignore the point color information on the shader that you apply to your object.

This is still happening in the non-commercial version 16.0.633. This is a very primary bug, Houdini have such potential but still not quite as robust as the 2 main rivals when it comes to simple tasks. I found a work around for the black surface generated after importing an .ai file, just add a color node before the material node inside the geo. Make sure to leave the color inside the color node as white and voi la, hi color!

As awong said above, please submit a bug report [www.sidefx.com] with the relevant files and a sequence of steps to reproduce the problem if something is being imported incorrectly.

long time ago in a galaxy far away I produced this tool to clean AI files:
https://www.orbolt.com/asset/Butachan::aiCleanerNH::1.0

I think it still can be used for cleaning up imported AI.

Nic.

Because there has never been an answer given to this question and I stumbled over this thread while looking for something else, here is the answer by the Entagma guys: How to render only the outline starts at about 3:30
https://vimeo.com/282137418 [vimeo.com]

In short: Use the “ends” SOP to open the spline

It's not a bug. It's because the polys have a Cd attribute of 0,0,0 (black). They're also imported as a bezier nurbs.

You need a color sop to change to white (normal Houdini poly colour) and a convert sop to change to polys. You can adjust the resolution on the convert sop or use a resample before the convert to adjust the res.