Hey all
Without having to manually create matching polygonal geometry, would it be possible to export a baked marker sim as an alembic?
WHY: I have a cloth sim that want to react to a heavy dangling necklace of a character. I want the necklace to push the cloth out of the way or flatten a collar in Houdini so I need a representation of the ragdoll simulation with its simplified rigids in Houdini.
Wouldn’t that be:
If the thing you record are joints, that drive a mesh, then you could export the baked geometry as if it was a regular skinned animated character. Is that what you mean? 
True – however that geometry is super dense. The marker geom is as simple as it gets.
Exporting it would just be a convenience. I guess I can create matching actual polygonal geom and bake that out.
Ahaa, you want to get that triangle/Convex Hull geometry that Ragdoll generates out of Ragdoll and into regular polygonal geometry? Hm, that isn’t possible at the moment. But could be made possible… Let me have a think about that… It would take very little effort, it just hasn’t come up before. I’m about to push a new minor release in the next day or two, I’ll see if I can squeeze this in there.
Oh man. I can think of a million ways this would help me in Houdini. Thank you!
Clarification: Vellum in Houdini doesn’t have a rigid implementation that is implemented in the Vellum solver. There are ARAP (as rigid as possible) objects, but they are not truly rigids - yet. With Ragdoll Dynamics I can iterate more and get it working the way I want.
Hello there! Was this feature ever added? Would like to also export simplified animated geometry from markers of the characters to interact with particle sims.
It appears so!
It will generate Maya geometry of whatever Ragdoll has got to work with under the hood.
These can be constrained to your character and baked out as Alembic, for a low-poly version that aligns exactly what what Ragdoll used to simulate.
