Maya To Houdini plugin- BETA VERSION
Written in Maya API (Python)
It is still being developed. It takes each polygon mesh in the scene and exports a .geo file, if animation is present it exports a .chan file and creates an script to import back into houdini.
TO USE
Put it in your MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH and load like any other plugin. this will only work in Maya 8.5 and up. it has been tested on windows xp,vista, and Linux and seems to work fine.
you should now have another file export option "houdini9X" listed.In theory it will work with older versions of houdini as well.
To Load in Houdini, open an hscript textport and type "source filename.hs" where you exported your data. After this step , you can delete your .chan files and the hscript but the .geo files will be linked to your hip file when you save.
KNOWN PROBLEMS
It is still being built !!
The time is not properly converted from maya to houdini , the frame ranges will result in differing lengths , this will be corrected in the official release.
The camera settings are not translated over , this will also be fixed in the official release.
the names will become quite long, this is because I choose to use Maya's full path name with "_" instead of pipes "|", however on the meshes I did not do this. as a result NO TWO MESHES CAN HAVE THE SAME NAME!! i am planning on adding a "short" and "long" name mode but this is not fully implemented.
The animation is hard wired to export frames 0-200. To change this open the script in a text editor and it is right at the top. However, startframe needs to be at 0 because there is currently no logic to do a frame range , houdini by default assumes that that it begins at zero. This will be fixed in a later release ,(I seem to recall the chread command has a frame range option)