What's new What’s new in Houdini 9: Keyframe animation

Houdini 9 takes existing keyframe animation features and makes them easier to use.

Overview

The Auto Key used to be a preference you had to set manually in the preferences menu. Now all you have to do is turn on the Auto Key button on the playbar. Also, key editing can now be done by simply holding the ⇧ Shift key.

Additionally, a Functions toolbar has been added to the Channel Editor.

Auto key

This tool allows you to automatically set keyframes every time you adjust a parameter value.

  1. Click the Auto Key button on the playbar.

  2. Set a keyframe by pressing K to set the scoped channel values, or click ⇧ Shift + on the channels you want to scope in the parameter editor. Auto key will only key scoped channels.

    Tip

    To make Auto Key create a keyframe every time a parameter is changed, turn on Set Keys on Pending Channels in the Animation preferences (Edit>Preferences>Animation).

  3. Slide the play head forward in time.

  4. Transform, rotate, and scale your animation.

  5. Press play to view your animation.

Note

You can go back to different points in your animation and change parameter values, which will be automatically keyframed.

Key Editing

Key editing used to have to be turned on and off by clicking Enable Key Editing on the playbar. You can still edit keys this way; however, now you can also toggle this tool on and off by holding the ⇧ Shift key. When using this method, a shadow of the selector remains visible on the playbar.

Note

⇧ Shift + only moves the selector and ⇧ Shift + moves the keys with the selector.

Moving one keyframe

  1. Hold ⇧ Shift + on the keyframe.

  2. Drag it to another location on the playbar.

Setting a selection range

  1. Press ⇧ Shift + on the playbar to view your selector.

  2. Hold ⇧ Shift + and drag the edge of the selector to increase or decrease the selection range.

Moving multiple keyframes

  1. Hold ⇧ Shift + the middle region of the selector and drag it on top of the keys you want to move.

  2. Hold ⇧ Shift + the middle region of the selector and drag it to another location on the playbar.

Scaling multiple keyframes

  1. Hold ⇧ Shift + the middle region of the selector and drag it on top of the keys you want to scale.

  2. Hold ⇧ Shift + the edge of the selector and drag to scale the selected region.

This is useful for speeding up or slowing down the animation.

Channel Editor

There is a new Functions toolbar on the right side of the Channel Editor, which allows you to easily change the type of function.

  1. Select a curve in the Channel Editor.

  2. Click the desired function button on the Functions toolbar.

The Function drop-down menu is still available on the Graph Functions toolbar at the bottom of the Channel Editor pane.

Key-able checkboxes and text fields

You can now key the values of checkboxes and text fields just like numeric values.