Blackmagic Forum

Fbx and alembic from 3dsmax to fusion is really problematic. I've got use to it but it's a massive time suck. There aren't the options available 'just' to make stuff work and I inevitably end up fix transforms by hand in fusion.
Fusion can't deal with:
Mixed axis - mirrored objects end up upside down.
Cameras are 90 degrees out.
Object hierarchies are imported with weird oscillations
Animated rotations of more than 360 degree are shuffled back to a 360 range causing weird effects.
Camera FOV and Film back are lost and I end up typing values in by hand.
FBX import doesn't check for pathmaps. I have to search and replace using a text editor to get things to reconnect on different machine.

Work-arounds are fine if you old have a few objects. But I have a 100 and fixing the scene everytime I import is melting my brain.

Could BMD please look at these 3d workflows and give us one click import options for the major 3d packages!

If a company wants more people to use their product it makes sense to use more "export to"
than "import from" options. Have you contacted Autodesk with this request or tried third party options like this example?
http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/max-to-fusion

So is this exporting alembic natively out of 3ds 2015 or what? I migrated to Houdini so I haven't updated my 2014 install but as you didn't have alembic support natively in 2014, I used the exocortex plugin for that. Not tried exporting and importing in Fusion with that, though.

Oh, and I can add importing alembic saved out of Houdini in Fusion works great, you have way more issues with fbx out of Houdini than alembic, in Fusion.

Some of these issues are just bugs in fusion

In the case of fbx mirrored axis issue fusions attempt to modify the transform is just plain wrong.

In the case of alembic the oscillations are caused by poor transform flattening if the hierarchy option is turned off.

Native cameras in max point along a different axis. A tick box in fusions importer would fix this.

Much as work arounds and custom scripting are an everyday part of this business. If BMD really want fusion to be 'mass market' then there needs to be some done on simple round trip workflows. Much as zbrush did with there goZ tools and eyeon did with the avid to fusion connection.

However we'll have more luck getting blood from a stone than features out of Autodesk. So I feel that interoperability needs to come from BMD.

I was thinking of my writing my own tool but I'll certainly check out the digital kitchen script.

Johnny Farmfield wrote:So is this exporting alembic natively out of 3ds 2015 or what? I migrated to Houdini so I haven't updated my 2014 install but as you didn't have alembic support natively in 2014, I used the exocortex plugin for that. Not tried exporting and importing in Fusion with that, though.

Oh, and I can add importing alembic saved out of Houdini in Fusion works great, you have way more issues with fbx out of Houdini than alembic, in Fusion.

I'm this close to getting Houdini. But I know Max like the back of my hand and its hard to leave. ( and vray is soo cool I'll probably stick it out with Autodesk until they finally kill the old subscription model... by then I hope to be up to speed on Houdini.

The Autodesk implementation of Alembic in max 2015 is so weak it makes me cry. At least exocortex plugin is now available for free but I had a few crash issues with the files in fusion

Kyriakos Rissakis wrote:If a company wants more people to use their product it makes sense to use more "export to"
than "import from" options.

Why? As a compositor I would like my app to be able to import everything. If the competition supports file formats that Fusion doesn't... why would I choose Fusion? (I'm not talking about anything in particular and not about Nuke as the competition.)

For example, I once wrote an .ma importer for Fusion because there's no way to automate that in Fusion's API. It would probably be just a day's work for BMD to add that scripting call AND it would support fbx, collanda, etc at no extra cost.

ken Turner wrote:I'm this close to getting Houdini. But I know Max like the back of my hand and its hard to leave. ( and vray is soo cool I'll probably stick it out with Autodesk until they finally kill the old subscription model... by then I hope to be up to speed on Houdini.

The Autodesk implementation of Alembic in max 2015 is so weak it makes me cry. At least exocortex plugin is now available for free but I had a few crash issues with the files in fusion

Max was my primary 3D application before migrating to Houdini and now, 6 months in, I can't even imagine going back, even though I do miss VRay and TP. The situation is similar to what I experienced in compositing too, working in Nuke and/or Fusion with the node based workflow, going back to After Effects is an absolute pain...

-"Whenever I hear of precomps, I release the safety catch of my Browning!" [Hanns Johst would have said that had he been a compositor]

Stefan Ihringer wrote:Why? As a compositor I would like my app to be able to import everything. If the competition supports file formats that Fusion doesn't... why would I choose Fusion? (I'm not talking about anything in particular and not about Nuke as the competition.)

It's more practical to support standard import and export options like WaveFront and Alembic than to try to support importing every file format in the industry, even just concentrating on the major ones, particularly when you account for the fact that a lot of the proprietary formats change from release to release in ways that aren't always supersets of previous versions. It can quickly reach a point where the dev team doesn't have time to implement any new features because they're too busy trying to keep up with the import formats.

That very problem is the reason that these standard formats exist in the first place. Some are de-facto standards it's true, but they're standard formats nonetheless.

We run into the same thing on the video side of things also. Resolve doesn't support all that many import and export options for timelines, yet it's pretty straightforward to grade edits from most major NLEs in Resolve because of the standardized formats like the FCP xml, EDL, AFF.

edit: fixed quote

Stefan Ihringer wrote:

Kyriakos Rissakis wrote:If a company wants more people to use their product it makes sense to use more "export to"
than "import from" options.

Why?

Because a project can then be used by more people and your work's value goes up, since you asked.

Alembic works great in Fusion. So where's the issue?

About Fusion supporting "all" formats - most formats are not open, so it's likely an impossible feat to have that. Better if we stick to one open format - imo.

Kyriakos Rissakis wrote:

Stefan Ihringer wrote:

Kyriakos Rissakis wrote:If a company wants more people to use their product it makes sense to use more "export to"
than "import from" options.

Why?

Because a project can then be used by more people and your work's value goes up, since you asked.

I agree when it comes to 3d apps. But for comp it's the other way around. You need to merge all the funky stuff that others can produce. Imagine if Fusion didn't support R3D and you'd have to reroute everything through red cine all the time.

@Johnny: of course I'm only expecting bmd to support formats for which documentation or libraries exist
Alembic isn't new but it wasn't supported by Fusion for a long long time.

Alembic is sort of a mess, too. When it works, great, but there's just so much that's open to interpretation. It feels like it was just designed to move things between Houdini and Maya without much thought in making it a real spec.

Hi guys,

I had a lot of issues as well on a previous production, but we discovered in Max at least, that we had to zero out the transformation to the origin. It seemed like some of the positions being imported into fusion are being calculated from the origin and not from the relative position within Max.

I'm not a Max user, but I do recall have a celebratory moment when we sorted that out.

I'm not 100% sure the term was 'zero out transformation', I do however know it was all related to the origin.

Stefan Ihringer wrote:I agree when it comes to 3d apps. But for comp it's the other way around. You need to merge all the funky stuff that others can produce. Imagine if Fusion didn't support R3D and you'd have to reroute everything through red cine all the time.

You are right Stefan, i was refering to Autodesk not BMD when i wrote the first post

Kyriakos Rissakis wrote:

Stefan Ihringer wrote:I agree when it comes to 3d apps. But for comp it's the other way around. You need to merge all the funky stuff that others can produce. Imagine if Fusion didn't support R3D and you'd have to reroute everything through red cine all the time.

You are right Stefan, i was refering to Autodesk not BMD when i wrote the first post

ah, that makes sense.
sorry for the misunderstanding.