Partio for Softimage

[Bullit]

http://www.disneyanimation.com/technology/partio.html

Particles are an important part of effects work, because they allow free-form information in 3D space. Unfortunately, there is no standard format for particles akin to Wavefront .obj. Most animation systems have their own proprietary particle formats. For example Maya uses the binary and ascii particle database formats .pdb and .pda file formats. Houdini uses the .geo and .bgeo geometry uber formats. Renderers typically have their own point cloud format such as RenderMan's PTC format and Houdini's .pc. All of these formats share a common theme. They allow particles to be iterated or indexed and associate a customizable set of attributes with them. The goal of Partio is to provide a unified interface akin to unified image libraries that makes it easier to load, save, and manipulate particle files.
Motivation
At Walt Disney Animation Studios, we had used a mix of PDB formats, PTC formats and BGEO formats, depending on the authoring environments. Many of our tools supported more than one of these, but the code was scattered and copied to read these formats. Additionally, some of these formats required linking to large libraries to use. For this reason we desired a library that could read and write all of these file formats in a simple way. This would allow all of our tools to easily support all the possible formats that we could throw at them. It also allowed more flexibility in moving particles into proprietary packages without having to write an importer/exporter for every different tool.

https://github.com/jamesvecore/PartioExportForSoftimage

[mjd3d]

Hi

I have compiled a DLL from the source code and I attached it..

Thanks

[danyargici]

Thanks, however it gives me a missing library error... Any ideas?

[Hirazi Blue]

Might just be a missing Visual C++ runtime. It would help if you could paste the error message you get here... ;)

[danyargici]

Sure, it's a pretty generic error though!

Library not found:
c:\pathtomyusersfolder\Application\Plugins\nt-x86-64\PartioExportForSoftimage.64.dll

Does it work for you?

[Helli]

Tried it, works fine.

Thank you a lot. Very useful.

[BenR]

As Hirazi mentioned it is most often a missing Visual C++ runtime. Running the plugin dll through Depends.exe shows that it requires dll's from the Visual C++ redistributable for Visual Studio 2013. So you could use Depends.exe to confirm that those are the missing components on your computer, or you could just download and install the redistributable from Microsoft and see if that fixes it.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download ... x?id=40784

Ben

[danyargici]

Thanks Ben, Hirazi.

That was indeed the issue. All working now!

[Rork]

Sweet!! Especially the SI > Houdini example.
So many things to test, so little time... ;-)

Thanks for sharing this, much appreciated.

rob