Blackmagic Forum

Hello everybody,
I have here Alembic Scenes, exported from 3Ds Max 2016, and when I want to import them in Fusion 8 under OSX, Fusion crashes directly after selection.
When I import them in Windows, save the comp and open this comp under OSX, it works fine.

Maybe it is a bug?!

I use a iMac, from end of 2013, 3,5 GHZ i7, 32 GB Ram, nvidia GeForce GTX 775M 2048MB. El Capitan.

No solution. Just wanted to report the same thing coming from Modo. FBX screws up the camera and Alembic crashes every time.

2013 Mac Pro. El Capitan.

Try either without camera, then import the camera transformations, or as another import.
Maybe it's the way the camera is setup that is causing the flipping and the crashing. just shooting in the dark here..

Well. It works fine if I import only the camera and modo generated meshes. I have a bunch of mesh items converted from CAD data. I need to just systematically strip the file of items until it works.

A quick report:

If mesh geometry was created in Modo it imports into Fusion just fine, provided it wasn't converted to SubD or PSubDs The camera animation does as well.

Often I import CAD files into Modo for rendering and animation. The CAD items are converted from the NURBs based file to a polygon mesh. The geometry is usually quite messy. These meshes always have an accompanying vertex normal map generated by Solidworks upon export. I thought this vertex normal map might be the cause of the problem but Fusion still crashes even if I delete it from the mesh item.

I tried copying the geometry from one mesh item to another. Still caused Fusion to crash upon import.

I've had great success importing the same file from Modo as an FBX. But the camera animations are not reliable because the camera flips around when the camera reaches 180 degrees.

I would love to work with someone on this and am willing to try further testing if someone has any ideas I could try. Modo has a large freelance population that I know would find Fusion very attractive if there was a reliable way of getting 3D content into the program. Nuke still remains out of reach for many of them.

Vance Bowman wrote:A quick report:

If mesh geometry was created in Modo it imports into Fusion just fine, provided it wasn't converted to SubD or PSubDs The camera animation does as well.

I'm confused. When does the geometry not work? If NURBS and SubD surfaces don't work, that's expected. Only polygon meshes are used in Fusion. Are there cases where polygon meshes don't export correctly?

Sorry. I will try to be clearer.

If I open Modo and make a basic sphere, animate the camera, then export as an Alembic file, I can import that into Fusion without problems. In modo, that sphere is a polygonal mesh made up of quads and tris.

However, I usually get CAD files from the industrial design team (STEP or Parasolid), then convert those to polygonal meshes via plugin. They are not SubD, but raw geometry, verts, faces, and edges, just like the sphere. They were not made in Modo though, but rather converted and imported. The geometry sucks, but it renders cleanly in Modo. If I include one of these mesh items in the alembic export, it will cause Fusion to crash immediately upon import. I can export the same mesh item as an FBX and it imports into Fusion just fine. The camera from the FBX screws up though.

Does that help? I can post the alembic file if it would help.

Vance Bowman wrote:Does that help? I can post the alembic file if it would help.

Oh, OK. Yeah, might be worth submitting a bug report with the file. Obviously it's not the mesh or Fusion, it's the import process, but that relies on Alembic libraries (just as FBX relies on FBX libraries). So it's unlikely that BMD would do much to mess around with those, but if it's an issue of an updated library or a wonky Alembic file where Modo wrote something that is unexpected, then a sample might be of use, if for nothing other than to have something for testing.

After looking around online and in the program, I can't find anywhere to submit a bug. Do I just post that on the forum?