Houdini

Houdini is a product that supports COLLADA

Technical information

• Latest version: Houdini 8.1
• Date: July 24th, 2006
• Bug reporting: Houdini Forum under 'Technical Discussion'

  Note that to download a free version of Houdini 8.1, report bugs or view our online journals, you need to register for a SESI Forum account.

• Forum: http://www.sidefx.com/journal
• Maintainers: Side Effects Software (SESI)
• Feature list: See below

External links

• Download Houdini Apprentice:

  You can *download a free version of Houdini Apprentice 8.1 from our download page: http://www.sidefx.com/download

COLLADA Importer for Houdini 8.1

24 Jul 2006

Houdini 8.1 includes support for importing COLLADA files. In Houdini 8.1, you are able to import Collada files in the following ways:

• A new "Import..." entry under the File menu. When selected, it will prompt the user with an "Import Options" dialog in which the user can select the COLLADA file and types of objects that will be imported.

• A new "colladaimport" hscript command used for importing COLLADA files.

• The File SOP. When a COLLADA file path is entered, the SOP will import the first geometry it finds in the file. The user can also append an id to the end of the file path in order to import a particular geometry (i.e. C:/path/to/collada_file.dae#geo_id ).

Here is a list of what is initially supported in the Houdini 8.1 COLLADA importer:

• Geometry:
  • lines, linestrips, polygons, polylists, triangles, tristrips and trifans
  • no polygon holes, no splines
  • vertex normals, tangents and texture properties are not supported

• Lights:
  • ambient, point, directional and spot lights

• Cameras:
  • orthographic and perspective cameras
  • only the near and far clipping plane parameters are imported

• Transformations:
  • translations, rotations (Euler only) and scales
  • no skews or matrices

• Nodes:
  • node transform hierarchies
  • node ids are preserved
  • joint nodes are currently imported as Null objects. This will allow you to get bone animation into Houdini for muscling in Houdini 8.1.

• Animation:
  • keyframe animation is supported
  • no hermite, cardinal or bspline interpolation