First forum post, just gonna introduce myself. I’m
HolesinShoes, and you can find me on Instagram @HolesinShoes3D
Onto the question:
I love blender, but it’s physics simulations can sometimes leave me underwhelmed. I purchased the awesome flip fluids addon, and was delighted, however it by no means matches the power of Houdini FX, which I also use frequently. I do however find houdini’s rendering system and engine to be extremely difficult, slow, and clunky, and I’d prefer to use blender for all of my modelling, scene management etc.
Is there an easy way that anyone knows of to work between blender and Houdini, especially for fluid simulations?
My main issue is with making sure scaling, rotation, and other things stay the same between both programs. Houdini is way faster with simulation than blender, but that’s worthless if it takes me hours to fix the scene once it gets into Houdini.
Thanks for the suggestion with alembic though, it worked really well for getting my fluid sim out of Houdini and into blender.
Hi, I don’t really use houdini, so it is hard to say what the proper procedure for exporting an alembic file for use in blender is. A lot of people here use houdini for sims and blender for rendering, but I couldn’t find any in depth details concerning that.
I did a quick search and this forum post concerning another export issue says that you have to make sure all your objects have names before export.
Everything else would have to be settings you have to make sure are correct before exporting the file. Z is up in blender not Y, so the main thing would be to make sure you export the file with Z as the up axis if you can.
Lastly, there is an export script called blembic that people used before blender had official alembic support:
If this addon still works, then it might be worth trying if you have a hard time getting houdini to export the .abc file properly.