Hi,
I know this is more a Vray issue than a Houdini one but just wanted to ask here in case anybody managed to solve it. (or maybe someone could benefit from knowing it )

I was trying to convert some .bgeo files to .vrmesh for the Max team to render it in vray. It's a fairly straigth foward process… save geometry -> apply ply2vrmesh tool from vray -> read as vray proxy

It all works well with obj but rendering objs in houdini is taking several times longer than rendering bgeos. I read that the tool supports houdini's bgeo and geo format. But I keep getting an error like “Magic number not found” when using geometry exported from Houdini 12.1 or up…. I tried with some bgeo exported from H10 and it worked perfectly. Some of the changes made after H12 must be the problem..

Anybody had the same problem? Any work around?


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On the same topic in case somebody wants to use this, the new versions of VRay accept alembic files directly as vray proxies. I would loev if we used Mantra here… but there are a lot of Max users in my company …

thanks in advance

The .bgeo file format changed in H12, so old tools that only understand the old .bgeo format no longer work. To inter-operate, save out your geo with the .bhclassic extension, and then rename to .bgeo for this old tools which don't understand it.

thanks a lot Edward! that did it
I wasn't aware of that extension

for future readers: be sure to not be using convert your polysoups before saving .bhclassic since it won't support it. I know is kind of an obvious thing to say.. but could save someone from asking a similar question.

I tried searching the help docs to read about what H12 stuff we can't save as bhclassic but found nothing on the topic. Any other consideration to have in mind apart from polysoups when saving in that format?

I know you mentioned 3DSMax and Alembic support for that is somewhat lacking, but its worth noting that modern versions of V-Ray support Alembic along with .vrmeshes. And while Alembic files aren't as optimized for V-Ray as the voxelized vrmesh files they are a viable format, plus Maya and Houdini both support Alembic also.

yeap, actually I was saying that about the new versions of Vray, that they support alembic i think its 2.40 and up that supports it.

I read somewhere that vray converts the alembic file into a vrmesh anyway before rendering, so I might as well have a simple post render script on houdini to spit the vrmeshes.

Also my case the render farm hasn't been completely updated to the newer versions, so its a good way to prevent errors.

robonilla
I tried searching the help docs to read about what H12 stuff we can't save as bhclassic but found nothing on the topic. Any other consideration to have in mind apart from polysoups when saving in that format?

I think it's kinda assumed that any new primitive types added won't be supported. So offhand, the only other new primitive type are VDBs, but they weren't added until H12.5.