What interchange file formats can store edges with no faces?

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1

I am trying to get a series of shapes that are comprised of only vertices and edges over to Houdini.

Right now I am using obj which can store this type of information, but the way Blender writes these obj files and the way Houdini interprets them is different enough that it causes some headaches. I have a workaround that hopefully will get me to where I want to go, but I was curious whether there were any other file formats that could store this kind of data.

I tried Alembic, USD, and FBX to see whether they would keep the edges when I exported them to the file and then re-imported them to Blender. But they all appear to only store the vertices. The edges disappear in that round-trip.

Is there any other kind of format that you can think of that would store the edges if there are no faces?

2

Try the method of the video.
It seems like automation Addon for file exchange in FBX format.

I’m not a Houdini user, so I didn’t check it. :thinking:

3

Thanks for the link. I saw that tool when I was researching how to do the export. I haven’t tried it mostly because when reading the Readme it appears that the tool is mostly just a wrapper that writes to FBX and then opens Houdini and reads in the FBX. And as far as I can tell, FBX does not support edges that are not part of a face.

4

Hello again :wink: (splendid idea to solve your inital problem :+1: ) … in fact you may try collada ??

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5

Aha! I had forgotten about collada. Let me test that now!

Thanks!