Just watched the videos for onion skinning, animation layers, and the pose library/character picker. None of them were adequate. The pose library/character picker and onion skinning videos relied on digital asset functionality that is not generally applicable. How do I use onion skinning if I am not using that simple bouncing ball asset?

Same goes for the pose library. I am not using the girl character, I have no plans or need to use the girl character. However when I try to use the pose library I get a series of python errors, and there is nothing in the documentation that helps clarify a procedure to use the pose library properly.

The animation layers video is incredibly simplistic and does not reflect the kind of animation workflow or task one would be doing in Houdini!

Please consider making tutorials that show how to use these character and animation tools from scratch and do not rely on digital assets to take shortcuts!

But that's the nature of Houdini.

It gives you the ability to create in many different ways and contexts. There is no one way of doing things.

A person who makes a tutorial has no way of knowing how another person will prefer to go about doing their project.

The only way that could happen would be having an actual tutor on a one to one basis.

Yes, I am aware of the nature of houdini

They showed it using default assets which have functionality to use the new tools built in. If they would have shown how to build that functionality into the default assets it would have been much better.

The Pose Library and Character Picker both need to create and store files - the question then is where to store these files - currently they work with HDAs, the files are stored within the HDAs.
There are improvement coming to both of those tools, and any suggestions are welcome - just log an RFE (I have plenty in there already )

Onion Skinning exists on all Geometry Objects - see the Misc Tab. and can be activated in the Display Options (D in the viewport) under Viewport.

As far as the ‘general applicability’ of HDAs in character work, I'll have to disagree with you there…if you're not using HDAs in your character work then you're missing out on a huge range of features that are essential IMO.

Character and Animation are areas that are getting a great deal of attention right now - some of which you might get a glimpse of at SIGGRAPH and in the future.

Ok thanks for the clarification. The HDA's I was complaining about are the default characters that have everything already set up. They don't make for very good demonstration assets in the case of the pose library and character picker in my opinion.

A video showing us how to setup our HDA's to use the pose library and character picker would have been more useful in my opinion.

Regarding onion skinning, I guess that means there is currently no way to apply it to just bones since they aren't geometry nodes? I am editing mocap data for export to a game engine and I don't need to apply mocap to a character rig in Houdini since the game engine handles that.

Thanks again, I'll start taking apart the default characters and see if I can figure out how to setup my mocap to work with the pose library and picker.