camera Export from Maya to Houdini?

#1

Hi, I’m trying to export maya camera into Houdini, but I’m not getting exact render output that is matching to maya renders…please guide on this.

#2

If you want to bring a Maya cam to Houdini you have to account for the scale difference.
Maya’s default units are centimeters whereas Houdini’s are meters so that requires you to scale down your cameras in Maya by 100 times.

It’s not quite that easy though as Houdini REALLY doesn’t like scaled cameras. So you have to do the following steps:

  1. Group your Maya cam
  2. Scale the group node to .01
  3. Duplicate the Maya cam in that group
  4. Remove the duplicated cam from the group and set it’s scale values to 1
  5. Parent constrain new cam to the original camera in the scaled down group
  6. Bake animation of new camera
  7. Delete parent constraint
  8. Write out new baked cam to alembic
  9. Import into Houdini via alembic archive
  10. Set camera resolutions in Houdini for render

Hope this helps, I would advise writing a little MEL or Python script to automate this if you will be doing it frequently.