Exporting Hair to Alembic 

• Exporting Hair to Alembic
  • Overview
  • Exporting hair to Alembic
  • To import the Alembic hair with V-Ray Proxy
  • Using MEL to export hair to Alembic

 

Overview 

Exporting Ornatrix Maya hair to Alembic video tutorial

Ornatrix provides a special translator which allows writing one or more hair objects into an Alembic file. The resulting .abc files can be imported in a myriad of CG software which supports Alembic. They can also be used with V-Ray Proxy objects to quickly load and render the resulting hairs anywhere V-Ray is used. There are options to export single frame or an animation range as well as viewport or render representation of the hair.

 

Exporting hair to Alembic 

To export a hair object to Alembic file:

1. Select the Ornatrix hair object which you want to export
2. Go to Main Menu -> File -> Export Selection...
3. In Export Selection dialog select Ornatrix Alembic file type in the Files of type list at the bottom (you may need to scroll down)
4. Type in the desired name of your .abc file and press Export Selection

 

To import the Alembic hair with V-Ray Proxy 

After exporting Ornatrix hair using the steps above you can import these hairs using V-Ray proxy:

1. Activate the VRay shelf (you may first need to load the vrayformaya.mll plugin in the Plugin Manager)
2. Click on the Import VRay proxy button, second from the left
3. In the File(s) box click the folder icon to browse. Select your exported .abc file
4. The hair should now be imported and appear within the viewport

 

Using MEL to export hair to Alembic 

In addition to exporting hair to Alembic through the UI you can also do it through scripting using MEL. The following command will export a hair object to Alembic file:

void OxAlembicExport( string $fileName, string[] $hairObjectNames );
/* Flags:
-ft From time
-tt To time
-s Step
-r If present, render versions of the hair will be used
-o If present, all coordinates will be exported in object space instead of world space
*/

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