I have a lot of Alembic cache files from Houdini that I have inside 3dsmax. I want to know if there is a way to turn them into PRTS?
It’s a lot of point rendering so I’d like to be able to use Krakatoa. However, it seems right now Krakatoa doesn’t recoginzie the Alembic object when I try to chose it as a particle source.
Please tell me there is something that can be done. Need some help as soon as possible.
thanks
When you bring the Alembic files into Max, what else can you do with them? In other words, if you don’t have Krakatoa, how would you use these particles? Any way to turn them into geometry vertices for example? Or load them into PFlow?
Also, what plugin are you using to load the ABC files in Max? Does it provide MAXScript access to its data?
Here is more information Bobo:
3dsmax 2012
Alembic from Exocortex
There is no way to load them into PFLOW directly.
The do show up in the viewport as dots displayed and we can see the animation.
We have Krakatoa and thought it would be recognized as a particle source but it does not so we can not do point renderings of this data.
We have no other way to render this Alembic data exported from Houdini.
Is there anything you guys can do to help or point in the right direction for this. Deadlines are coming soon much help appreciated.
Hmmm.
Have you talked to Exocortex about this? It makes no sense to only SHOW dots in the viewport without a way to access them in most renderers. So I suspect there is some way to access that data in some way. If there is a way to produce a mesh with vertex per particle, then Krakatoa would be able to render/convert that. Or at least MAXScript access? If there were a way to read the data via MAXScript, then you could easily write a converter that outputs to PRTs.
ABC particle support is on the Krakatoa Wishlist since July (Siggraph 2013), but there are no immediate plans to implement it. So we need a workaround to get you going. I wonder if there are external converters that can read Alembic and output something else…
This is the first time I’ve used Exocortex. It seems to be the only option in max is the viewport dot displace & if you want to render as ticks.
The particle cache files is so heavy we are only able to display 10percent in the viewport anything higher 3dsmax just crawls. So converting to a mesh of some sort would probably choke 3dsmax as well. Not even sure how we’d go about that. Frost wasn’t able to use the Alembic spruce files either.
What version of Houdini was used to save the ABC files?
I would strongly suggest emailing Exocortex with your question: How do I convert Alembic particles to Max particles?
If there is a way, they will know about it.
OK thanks we will try to contact them and see if that can be done.