My classes began today. After some last minute changes, here is my schedule for this semester:

1. Particle Effects 1
   This will be taught in Autodesk Maya. Hopefully we’ll get into nParticles which is a new particle system in Maya 2009. We have a new instructor for the class: Markus Burki, currently a visual effects animator. The last movie he worked on was “Monster vs. Aliens“.
2. VFX Cinematography
   Taught by Kenneth Ferro (who is amazing btw), this class will teach lighting and cinematography with respect to VFX. It’s great for those pursuing a track as a VFX supervisor. We’ll be using a few high-end cameras like the RED One 4K camera. We’ll be shooting some stock footage for the school as well as work on some class projects. I’m looking forward to this.
3. Nuke 2: Advanced Compositing
   We have a great instructor for this class – Kyle McKulloch who currently works at the Orphanage in SF. A few of the movies that he worked include Iron Man, Live Free or Die Hard, and The Last Mimzy. The class will touch on of all the advanced features in the Nuke compositing package. Ultimately, I will be working on some of my thesis shots.

I found this maya plugin that seems to work reasonably well for importing a BGEO sequence from Sidefx Houdini into Autodesk Maya.

You can download the plugin from here: http://www.houdinistuff.com/

The instructions provided in the readme file can be a bit confusing.  Here are the steps I used to successfully load a Bgeo sequence from houdini:

1. Save the bgeo.mll file into your plugins folder and load it in maya.
   
2. Open the command line editor and run: mBgeoReader
   
   
3. This will create a new poly object called mBgeoReader. Check in the outliner window.
   
4. Select the object and go to the attribute editor.
   
5. Enter the Path to the bgeo files.
   
6. Done. You can pan through the timeline to see the animation sequence.

I haven’t yet tried exporting a Bgeo sequence from Maya, but the import worked successfully. Some problems that you may run into are attributes like velocity that aren’t  transferred into the Maya scene. At least I haven’t been able to during my test run. If there is a way, let me know. Without the velocity attribute, I wasn’t able to produce an accurate motion blur in Maya.

It may be a good idea to turn off any attributes in Houdini before using the ROP output node to create the bgeo sequence. This should increase performance in Maya. Lastly, use the geometry cacheing in Maya to speed things up if needed.