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.