Asset conversion
- Agent type: If you export a skinned mesh from Maya and you want to use it in Houdini, make sure the mesh is triangulated and set the normals per face.
- Agent type: The skeleton root must be tagged as pelvis.
Agent type: the viewport skinning preview only supports 3 joint weights per vertex maximum. Please make sure to skin each vertex to 3 joints maximum or the Viewport preview won't display correctly.
Agent type: (Maya only) your joint local rotation values must always be set to 0 before exporting your skeleton.
- Animation clip: Please make sure the joints between a foot root and the foot ik are animated only on one axis before exporting your animation. Joints animated on more than one axis will not be evaluated properly by Atoms IK.
Rendering
- Vray does not work with agent groups. If you want to render with vray you have to cache your simulation and create an AtomsProxy node.
- All render engines. Rendering a group node does not work with motion blur. If you want to use motion blur you have to render from a AtomsProxy node.
Agent overrides
- MAYA: When using python please make sure your agent override plug id is always the same as the "Key" compound child attribute. If these two values will differ, you might experience unpredictable results.
- HOUDINI: Unlike Maya the agent override dialog performances can be quite slow when it comes to agent groups with several thousand agents. This is because the different way Houdini has for handling parms/attributes.
Maya specific
Maya 2017 update 4: if the imath python module located into the Maya installation is loaded before Atoms, Atoms will start throwing errors like the following.
ArgumentError: Python argument types in AnimationClip.setDirection(AnimationClip, V3d) did not match C++ signature: setDirection(class Atoms::AnimationClip {lvalue}, class Imath_2_2::Vec3<double>) #To avoid this, please ensure the Atoms scripts folder comes before the site-packages Maya folder in your PYTHONPATH.
Houdini specific
- The points layout tool is not available. When using a points layout: 1) to edit the position of the agents modify the incoming mesh points. 2) to edit the direction you need to set a "atoms_pointsLayout_directions" vertex attribute. 3) to edit the agent type you need to set a "atoms_pointsLayout_agentTypes" vertex attribute.
- The variation builder won't bake the textures for any of the render engines from inside Houdini.