I am playing around with rigs my self. Try out the
simplemale or
simplefemale rigs under the Character shelf. They are nice FK/IK rigs to practice animation with.
Another way to get a rig into Houdini is to import it from a FBX or Alembic. Many programs will generate an FBX such as
Make Human [
makehuman.org] and
Blender [
blender.org] which are both free.
Blendswap.com [
blendswap.com] has rigs that you can load in Blender then export as FBX as a starting point. Make Human supports multiple skeleton types so you can target what kind of rig you need. Such as game, talking etc… But FBX will only get you FK rigs only.
There are also motion capture files that Houdini can convert into Script command files (.cmd) that you can execute inside a
Textport window. The conversion tools are found in the
bin folder where Houdini is installed or inside the framework on OSX.
mcbiovision, mcacclaim and mcmotanal.I have attached the result of passing a BVH file from the
CMU Collection [
sites.google.com] through the Houdini conversion tool. This produces two files. A
.cmd file and a
.bclip. The
.cmd file is what you execute to construct the rig, it is a script. The
.bclip is what you browse to populate the file node inside the mocap CHOP network constructed by the script.
USAGE: Add a Textport window to your interface and you should see a black console style screen.
Type:
source “C:\my_path\08_01.cmd”
(where
my_path is where you unzipped the attached files.)
This will execute the
.cmd file as if it were
hScript source code. If all goes well you will see a very flat stretched out bone rig in the viewport. Dive inside and then inside the
mocap node and notice that the file node is colored RED. This is because the path to the
.bclip file which drives the bones is invalid. Browse to the
08_01.bclip file and the rig will populate with the animation from the original BVH file.
NOTE: I typically scale this rig down by 0.01 at the object level to bring it into real world approximate size. It comes in very large.