ass workflow between Houdini and Maya

[papiauto]

Hi,

I want to know if there are other wokflow to transfert stuff between Houdini and Maya. Cause the ass export from houdini is pretty long, for example one of the fx take 5 min per frame whereas bgeo is about 20s. The file size is also very different 4.5 Go vs 1 Go.

So for this particular Fx we decided to render it with mantra ...I saw some Alembic procedural on web but none is ready to use ala vrayProxy. Do you plan to have an alternative to that ?at the studio we are on arnold 5 with maya 2016 ( maya 2018 transition come to the next month)

thank you,

Thomas

[teddude75]

Hey, I was doing a waterfall in Houdini and transferred it to Maya using Houdini Engine. Here's a video with the same technique.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zI-Nu8j0nA4

Good Luck

TED

[rendermen]

Use alembic for geometry and VDB for volumes. Arnold *.ass is a great option also, it could be long because your "compile" your scene into native Arnold format and it could take time depending on the scene complexity and context.

[papiauto]

Thank you for your reponse.

Using Hengine is not an option to our studio, cause we dont have enought hengine licenses compare to Arnold license on the farm.

The maya Alembic implementation is very bad, we lost all the extra attributes that we want to use in the shading. With the soup plugins it s possible to recover some but globally i find this workflow inefficient.

If you have a ton of abc load into maya, it becomes useless and unstable.

a default abcToArnold will be a great addition, or a dedicate ROP to export ass with descent time/size.

Have fun,

Thomas

[rendermen]

If the problem with Alembic is the attribute lost in Maya, I think there should be a way to fix this.