Import Assembly

Import Assembly brings a kit of parts into the assembly workflow from a wire, a USD file or a BGEO file, finds the shared instances and assigns materials. It is the first step inside the Assembly Resource.

Import Assembly brings a kit of parts into the assembly workflow. It reads the kit from its first input, a USD file or a BGEO file, finds which pieces are instances of the same geometry, and assigns materials. It is the first step inside the Assembly Resource, which is where you'd normally set these things. It is also on the toolbar's Assemblies menu, but the rigging steps that follow it are hidden, so use the Assembly Resource to rig a kit.

Input

Wire geometry into the first input and Sops Input switches to it by itself. With nothing wired, Filetype picks the file: USD (the default here) or BGEO. The parts should have their pivots at their base, where each joins its parent; Pivot Edit fixes them when they don't.

Settings

Uniform Scale and Rotate set the kit's size and orientation. The name attribute (name by default) marks instances of the same geometry, which share the same name.

Material

Each row under Material assigns a Surface Resource to a group of faces, as on the Assembly Resource: leave Group empty for the whole kit, or use any Houdini group, including the shape groups (cardish, tubeish, needleish, blobish), which are a guess from each piece's shape (double-sided leaves can read as tubeish) and worth checking in the viewport. Several rows give a kit several materials.

Identify Shared Instances

Identify Shared Instances finds the pieces of a model that are copies of one another and names them, so they can be kept as shared parts. Import Assembly and Rig to Assembly use it internally; it is hidden from the Tab menu.

Import Props

Import Props loads a folder of mesh files, such as leaves, flowers or rocks, caches them, and names and splits them into parts ready for decoration. Experimental.