A new version of Cineversity has been launched. This legacy site and its tutorials will remain accessible for a limited transition period

Visit the New Cineversity
   
 
Alembic To FBX Issues
Posted: 27 November 2019 08:58 PM   [ Ignore ]  
Total Posts:  28
Joined  2018-06-06

Hi
I have a scene containing 2 Alembic simulation of voroni fracture.
While exorting to FBX only one gets exported with animation.
The only difference i could isolate, is that the problematic alembic doesn’t have PSR animation, only PLA animation_due to the original set-up (which i don’t have..)

In the linked file the export issue is on the group called BIG_SIM

https://www.dropbox.com/s/a7n6io4acwou77j/Alembic Issue.rar?dl=0


Any help or solution would be much appreciated.

Thanks

G

Profile
 
 
Posted: 27 November 2019 09:35 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 1 ]  
Administrator
Avatar
Total Posts:  12043
Joined  2011-03-04

Hi Gil,

Thanks for the dropbox files, but they are rar files, which, as far as I know, to have several massive security problems. I will not touch those.

Would you mind to have a zip file instead? Thanks.

From what I understood so far, you have two Alembic files from a source that can’t give you more information, and all you want to do is to convert this to an FBX for the use somewhere else. So, you will use Cinema 4D as a converter. Is that correct? I’m not certain if I can be of any help here, but I will have a look into the zip files, of course.

To see what the alembic object contains, have a look here:
https://help.maxon.net/us/index.html#OALEMBICGENERATOR


Cheers.

 Signature 

Dr. Sassi V. Sassmannshausen Ph.D.
Cinema 4D Mentor since 2004
Maxon Master Trainer, VES, DCS

Photography For C4D Artists: 200 Free Tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DrSassiLA/playlists

NEW:

NEW: Cineversity [CV4]

Profile
 
 
Posted: 27 November 2019 10:29 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 2 ]  
Total Posts:  28
Joined  2018-06-06

Hi
it is a single file containing 2 groups from the original file.
Here is an updated link for a zip file.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/o4zt31eimviwygp/Alembic Issue.zip?dl=0

It doesn’t open correctly in Maya as well, therefore the effort of converting it to FBX.
i do not have access to the original files at the moment.

Thank for checking it.

Gil

Profile
 
 
Posted: 27 November 2019 11:06 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 3 ]  
Administrator
Avatar
Total Posts:  12043
Joined  2011-03-04

Thanks for the files, and the extra work, Gil, very much appreciated.

I have produced a short little clip that goes one time through a demo scene. I made it based on the information of your initial post. Your scene is converting here since quite a while, if it is done, I will check if my suggestion works for your file as well. The file came while working on the clip.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/ei06tjTIwFe3TGshkBquXeLwxw29JkJuR2AKFEb0Nl1

The vertices animation from the Alembic file is not transferred to the FBX file. It needs to be produced (Animation Clip) and then written back to the objects. Then the FBX receives the information.

The FBX export produces a Folder with the PLA information. Make sure that this folder, as well as the FBX file,  stay together.

I hope that works for you.

All the best

P.S.: here is the content of the clip, This might help to see if it is working inside your pipeline. Since it is small, the test should be quick.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/m9ookM4OCErqSPxKRriXRxupJk5cpZ98pHB0gVCJ6iD

The Original abc file, could it be that it was created in 25fps? Just curious.

P.P.S.: SmallSim> Connectors_CubeConnectors_Cube - this group has over 10,000 objects that have nothing to share.

 Signature 

Dr. Sassi V. Sassmannshausen Ph.D.
Cinema 4D Mentor since 2004
Maxon Master Trainer, VES, DCS

Photography For C4D Artists: 200 Free Tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DrSassiLA/playlists

NEW:

NEW: Cineversity [CV4]

Profile
 
 
Posted: 28 November 2019 02:14 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 4 ]  
Total Posts:  28
Joined  2018-06-06

Seems to work smile

Thanks again for your help, and taking the time for preparing those examples.

GIL

Profile
 
 
Posted: 28 November 2019 05:08 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 5 ]  
Administrator
Avatar
Total Posts:  12043
Joined  2011-03-04

Hi Gil,

I hope your machine is faster than mine. This might take otherwise forever.

I have to explore if there is a faster way. Last night I selected (roughly) all clones that are not moving at all, besides the deleted parts mentioned in post #3 (P.P.S.), to limit the work. Even that took too long.

It would have been nice if the creator of the scene had used the Glue function to have the areas of no movement as large pieces. (Or limited the object to the bare minimum in size)

One alternative could be an OBJ-sequence, but that is so far guessing, so let me try first.

Have a great day, and if you are in the US: Happy Thanksgiving.

Cheers

 Signature 

Dr. Sassi V. Sassmannshausen Ph.D.
Cinema 4D Mentor since 2004
Maxon Master Trainer, VES, DCS

Photography For C4D Artists: 200 Free Tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DrSassiLA/playlists

NEW:

NEW: Cineversity [CV4]

Profile
 
 
Posted: 29 November 2019 05:08 AM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 6 ]  
Administrator
Avatar
Total Posts:  12043
Joined  2011-03-04

Hi Gil,

I tried to do this procedure with the file as you shared it. My patience and the CPU power here didn’t match. So, I stopped it.

I wanted to find something that works faster, at least for the file import and export.

First, I deleted the 10K+ nulls in the file, a leftover from the Voronoi Fracture, I assume. They are useless in the file. But might take up a lot of time.

Secondly, I tested the three main parts, the egg, the little dynamic island, and the primary environment. Only the Main (big) part caused trouble. I selected all none moving parts and placed them on a layer. I did so with a lasso first, roughly, then more object by object, which meant, the Big animated part had only a few hundred objects that needed to be converted. Those were the ones with the little green filmstrip, handpicked in a few hours (I needed to go one time through to see that it works. I would not look forward to doing it again, there must be a better way in the future, I will submit a suggestion). Anything else from the group, I merged. There is one single chunk from the many thousands of static objects, that failed. I guess that is a little bit of modeling, but this was not of my interest in the workflow.

With only 408 objects to process for animation, I was able to have this processed in hours, instead of a day or so. Then I wrote the Animation Clip back as PLA.

The complete export to FBX was then done under a minute. The folder with the PLA/FBX is quite large. You will find a link in your private Messages here on Cineversity.

Alternative to this, the Correction deformer can help with some other objects to “harvest” the point information, but I think it is better to find a way to use the clones axis, for objects that don’t really animate the vertices…

My best wishes

 Signature 

Dr. Sassi V. Sassmannshausen Ph.D.
Cinema 4D Mentor since 2004
Maxon Master Trainer, VES, DCS

Photography For C4D Artists: 200 Free Tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DrSassiLA/playlists

NEW:

NEW: Cineversity [CV4]

Profile
 
 
Posted: 29 November 2019 10:25 PM   [ Ignore ]   [ # 7 ]  
Administrator
Avatar
Total Posts:  12043
Joined  2011-03-04

Gil,

I was interested in the workflow that was presented to me. Since the original file wasn’t available, I had to explore why it went wrong and did not work at all for your purposes.
The Cinema 4D Help document shares clearly what each icon (Alembic) means, and what it contains. In the file, there is a lot of point-based animation (Green-Film-Strip). Since the clone/chunks have zero animation among these points, the question is, of course, why not use the clones axis to animate. This would reduce the overall amount of keyframe entries needed to a fraction.
Besides this, the split of the animation in a single object, small, as well as big, made me wonder why it works for the first two, but not for the last one (Big).
I presume that the animation technique was different here. So, I tried to use the most simple version possible to create this. The file is attached.

The one- minute screen capture goes through the four stages:
MG setup, the export of Alembic, Reimport (made editable “c”), and export as FBX, then import of FBX to see the results.
Clip
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/FvzJk8DZ9LdXCZ3r4PhdjGMPmrumfWxEJ3C1n6TQoRw

All of this was relatively fast and easily repeatable.
The setup was done, as much as possible, to stay procedural, while keeping static clone/chunks as larger objects (MG-Voronoi Fracture Glue)
Project file
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/UbnG04Oh4joZeuoa787Fk5SBfs7xp2WRnUsbLPMvYjT

I hope that helps to recreate the scene and cuts the dependency on a given file that can’t be adjusted at all anymore.

My best wishes for the project

 Signature 

Dr. Sassi V. Sassmannshausen Ph.D.
Cinema 4D Mentor since 2004
Maxon Master Trainer, VES, DCS

Photography For C4D Artists: 200 Free Tutorials.
https://www.youtube.com/user/DrSassiLA/playlists

NEW:

NEW: Cineversity [CV4]

Profile