Hi i am thinking will FBX support merging animation in stead of creating new scene from scratch? This is very important, due to having complete character with everything setup, i'd like to import only animation!

xcomb
Hi i am thinking will FBX support merging animation in stead of creating new scene from scratch? This is very important, due to having complete character with everything setup, i'd like to import only animation!

Let me ask a clarifying question. Are you saying that you already have a character in Houdini from some other source (either modeled in Houdini or maybe brought in from some other package earlier), and then you would like to be able to import animation from an FBX file, and assign appropriate channels to appropriate joints/bones of the existing character, without changing the character itself?

Exactly that's what i am trying to find out!

If the topology is the same, merge your FBX skeleton into the scene, import the channels into CHOPs then export them to your character.

Dragos

Hi first of all thanks for your reply!
I am not that good with chops to be able to do what you have mentioned, is there any way you can clarify what you have stated, like how do i import the channel animation?
I'd like to clarify what i have in my scene, what i usually do in Maya i have simple skeleton with proper naming, in MotionBuilder i export animation to fbx, then in Maya i am merging animation that way so it overrides my skeleton transformation and i get animated skeleton, so it doesn't matter what animation curves i import it will only use the skeleton i have in my scene.
In Houdini i have tried merging animation, in stead it created another node with joints!

You can use the fetch CHOP, then to get it back out use the export CHOP. Specifying the naming is important though, so if there's a convention in your rig it's good to import / export by that. Sometimes the default controls (like tx ty etc) get overridden instead of the stuff you want.

I will have to try, but one more question when i export the channels over to another rig, how do i specify to export to every joint in the root hierarchy ?
Also when fetching how do i fetch every joint in the root, like * for all joints?
Here is another thing, my hierarchy is constructed with joints and nulls, which is strange to me, as a user of maya, well the nulls have the rotation keyframes and the joints have lookat attributes pointing to nulls, like constraint system.
Any examples would really help me out!

xcomb
Here is another thing, my hierarchy is constructed with joints and nulls, which is strange to me, as a user of maya, well the nulls have the rotation keyframes and the joints have lookat attributes pointing to nulls, like constraint system.

This is because Maya is a joint-based system, and Houdini is actually bone-based, so there is no such thing as joint nodes. This means that if FBX importer were to do without null nodes, it would have to only use bones, and many joint-based skeletons would be impossible to import properly.

The current setup (null nodes with bones pointing from one to the next) is essentially a joint-based system, where if you replace the term “null node” with the term “joint node” you will get the same thing as Maya's joints.