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  • Published 21 Mar 2019

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)?

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Development Status: Open

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3di
21 Mar 2019

2 Comments

Josephbburg

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).

pearcecollinsbenjamin

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.