Christine Uyemura

Does anyone know a good way to export Houdini fur/hair to Maya?

I did a simple test where I just created a sphere, added hair to it and then created an alembic output node, specifying the sphere_fur obj as the root object and that didn't seem to work (when I imported the alembic into Maya there were nodes in the Outliner but nothing seemed to have actually imported.) I also tried to see if I could just export it as a bgeo, but that file was unreadable for Maya.

Is there a good way to do this? I'm just starting to learn fur/hair and I read that all of the “Appearance” attributes like Frizz are done through the shader - does that mean I can't export the fur with these attributes?

Thanks!

Thank you for pointing me in this direction! hou.hda.loadedFiles() and a try/ except worked perfectly.

Hi there!

I've created a digital asset that is defined in an hda library, and I'm creating a shelf tool that (among other things) creates a node of this HDA type. What is the best way to check if the hda library is installed? I want to do something like check if library is installed (manually via File -> Install Digital Asset Library or by nature of being in the houdinipath) and if not look for it in $HIP/otls and install it from there, and if it's not there either display a custom error message.

I found hou.HDADefinition.isInstalled(), but it looks like for that I would need to have the actual library file to know what the definition is. I was thinking maybe there was some way to try to create a node and if it fails (implying that the library isn't installed) then do something else. However when createNode() fails it doesn't return false it throws an error, so I'm not sure of the best way to approach this.

I hope this makes sense! Thanks in advance for your help!