Waiting for the big great time when the Fetch CHOP will actually let me import channels from another take (so you can more easily use CHOPs as a NLA), I'm trying some approaches.
The problems I got so far:

1. The export flag in CHOPs is not “take sensitive”. So if I set the export flag, it gets set in all the takes (unlike the display flag for example). That means you can't have a take with the channels animated by hand and another take with them overriden by CHOPs. Very bad and unexpected;

2. The solution for this would seem the use of Export CHOP with a second input, which can be used to activate/de-activate the export.
I'm stuck here (and the CHOPs docs doesn't help a bit): I'm animating an AutoRig and I have around 200 channels.
I put them in some nested channels groups (generated automatically by right-clicking on the asset and selecting Create nested channels group). This makes easy to import them by specifying the group in a Fetch CHOP, but I have no idea how to export them using the “path” field in the Export CHOP.
If I put the group there, nothing happens. If I put “*”, it overrides ALL the channels in the rig, by cycling through them (the expected behavior according to the docs.) I have no idea how to do this using the Exporter either.
Any suggestions?

For 2, try using `run(“chopls .”)` in the Path parameter of the Export CHOP. For layering anmation in CHOPs, what about keyframing separate chops and then using Composite/Switch/etc to combine them before exporting? I remember Simon Barrick offering an HDA which let you keyframe channels in CHOPs recently.

It was just a quickly put together example, it's over on odforce

here:


http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?showtopic=4752 [forums.odforce.net]

if its any use….

Yes, I know the asset. Something like this should be default in Houdini (other way to say this is “CHOPs and animation channels should be integrated”).

What would be nice for now would be to have the possibility to import channels from a different take. That is, the Fetch CHOP should have a “Take” menu (like the ROPs). This would bring takes full circle: one can do different takes and in another take the channels are imported, mixed, blended etc.
Of course, the export flag should be take sensitive for this to work.

Thanks Edward for the solution. I couldn't get it to work yet, it's probably my rusty scripting skills. I'll check the docs for string expansion.

Dragos