Houdini obj export

[enthewhite]

Can any Houdini users tell me how to export my Houdini scene as an .obj for use in Octane?

I'm sure this is my lack of knowledge about Houdini. I know I can right click on a geometry node in Houdini and save as .obj, but I want to be able to export the whole scene of geometries.

Also, any tips about how to add materials that Octane recognizes would be appreciated

Ian

P.S. Houdini is my new favorite program! I was raised on Solidworks, and it's hard to stop myself from wanting to model parametrically. Even softimage with its powerful ICE was not really working for me (I guess ICE is too low level... It's probably more powerful, but Houdini is just intuitive for me--parametric from the ground-up) I've finally found the entertainment industry's Solidworks equivalent. Soooo, let's hear it for an Octane Houdini plugin!!

[enthewhite]

I figured out that I can use "merge" and select all of the objects in the scene, then export the .obj from the new merged object. Maybe not the best way, but it works for now.

Now my question is: how to add materials to the objects in Houdini so that I can assign different materials to different objects in Octane?

[Lutze]

As far as I know this is a problem with the Houdini obj export that can not be solved without coding. Houdini only exports the geometry and does not write the .mtl material file. I have not figuered out how to get around this problem other than import the obj into another application, reasign materials there and export to octane. Very unsatisfying and I hope that some day there will be a proper Houdini/Octane Plugin or another file format to export to Octane such as rop...

[enthewhite]

Thanks, Lutze. That's what I was afraid of. Oh well, I'm still excited enough about Houdini right now to not worry about Octane integration yet. Hopefully enough people voice desire for a plugin!