Today is a big day,

Was able to finally import a workable animated FBX file into houdini.

Each time I have tried it brought in all of the history and joints into houdini creating a complex node system where I had no idea how to add the modifiers that i want to play with.

Below is a zoomed out view of all the nodes that had to deal with when importing a animation.

I found a forum post detail how to successful get a animated mesh out of maya without all the history.

It involves geo caching the mesh in maya with a Double fine precision. From here duplicating the mesh importing the cache to the new mesh then exporting the new mesh as a fbx with quick sets on.

For this I used the warrior animation i made last tri. but I hit a problem where I had animated with referencing, but the reference had locked chanels that cant access if been referenced.

So Created the geo cach then opened the warrior rig and imported the cache. I now had access to the locked channels so could unlock and duplicate.

This is the view of the nice node structure after importing into houdini after creating a cach in maya.

Once importing to Houdini there is only nodes for each separate piece of geo, the material and the animation. instead of the whole web. Much nicer to work with. Though I still came across the problem of not being able to access the nodes available to geometry but found a work around of going down a level of nodes into each individual geo and working at this sub level.

This is pretty exciting, now i can finally try and create a animated figure that does something with particles or houdini effects.

Below some screenshots of the warrior going through the animations from maya but with the point scatter node on it. woo!

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