What’s new in Houdini 9: Character animation

Houdini 9 has made character animation much more user-friendly and cutting-edge. It now makes muscle creation much more interactive and provides autorigged body parts for you to create your own custom characters.

Houdini 9 provides you with a ready-made character. All you have to do is place it in the scene and you are ready to animate. See the Toon Character help for more information.

There is also a whole range of autorigged body parts as well as a create rig tool, which allows you to build your own custom autorigged characters. These new features as well as others are available as tools on the Auto Rigs shelf.

The muscle tool now makes it much easier to define the shape of the muscle. In previous versions, you used to have to sculpt muscles using the Channel Editor. In Houdini 9, you can use the Muscle Control Handles to sculpt muscles.

Additionally, previous versions used to only allow for two types of custom profiles which you had to blend into the normal position; however, now that you can animate the muscle controls you have infinite sculpting possibilities.

The muscle consists of five points, which are spaced evenly along the muscle. There are two end points, a middle point, and middle points between each end and the middle of the muscle. You can change the position of the points using the Position slider on the parameter editor. However, you cannot change the position of the end points in the parameter editor. To move the end points you must move them in the scene view. Now that the muscle is divided into sections, you can define how many primitives (metaballs) there are per segment, instead of for the whole muscle.

You can now also scale your muscle in x, y, and z positions, instead of on a global scale, which will immensely expand your modeling and animation options.

The Deform muscle SOP now has Enable Multithreaded Deformation turned on by default. It also allows you to choose either Inflate all Points or Use Inflate Modifier Attribute in the Points to Inflate field on the Inflate tab in the parameter editor.