a way to utilise attributes created in houdini
a way to utilise attributes created in houdini, for example if I create a particles or a geometry in houdini, and then assign point attributes, like pscale (particle scale), velocity, density, length...or store any other value I want in each vertex, primitive, or point, it would be great if I could then utilise those attributes throughout blender.
One example is if I bring in a point cloud from houdini as an obj, then I might want to scatter grass on it, so in the blender scatter system, it would be great if I could set scale/length to be equal to each imported points pscale attribute, or the colour of each object to the points Cd attribute. Or I might need to scatter trees across a geometry based on bespoke point attribute called trees for example.
I can also store strings in polygons, so I could potentially store the name of a material or the path to a texture in a prim attribute, and then use that in an attribute node in the material editor.
The ability to have better access to attributes would also mean I could import vertex normals too (on meshes that only have vertices but no edges or polygons)?
2 Comments
Not sure how Houdini is exporting things, might that be the problem? Blender's Python API provides a way of reading data layers from vertices (BMesh).
Houdini has a multitude of different attributes, not just vertex-based attributes. Alembic files can hold this data, but many programs can't read it because they don't have a robust attribute system.