Eddie J.L. Christian

So it's time for my Yearly journey back to Houdini Character systems. After talking to some of the SideFX guys at Siggraph in Vancouver I was excited again by the idea of characters in Houdini. I went through the cat rigging tutorial (One of the more complete tutorials I have seen) and then I read through this thread again. I thought I would chime in on my opinions so far.
I do think the Bones instead of joints for the system was probably a mistake. And FBX import does become quite Huge and messy with the amount of nodes. And there seems to be NO easy system to attach Mocap and edit it on a character.

But beyond that I have to say the I just don't buy into the with “With Greater Power comes Greater Responsibility” concept that was implied in this thread. For one thing it's not more powerful when you have a mess of hundreds of nodes. It actually slows you down and makes you weaker. And it certainly shows with how Non-Responsive the rigs can be even on a very powerful workstation in Houdini. Personally I think this is one area that would be faster, More efficient, and productive with TOOLS instead of Nodes. It doesn't mean that the tools couldn't communicate with nodes. And overall the process would be a much more pleasant experience with proper tools.

Nodes are great. I use them in about a dozen programs. But too much of anything is a bad thing. I'll give an example:
I am just now learning Blender 2.8 which is in Beta currently. I got all the meshes for a character imported rigged and was animating in under 30 minutes. This was my very first time rigging in blender.

Getting the Houdini cat going properly took all night. If I can do this faster and have more fun doing it in a FREE software package, Then there is definitely a problem. Personally I think this slavish devotion to nodes is the key to the problem.

Add to this, that Simple things like importing OBJ's can't even handle material importing. Or that the Materials imported with the FBX import are your older material set-ups, And you have a system that seems slow and more then a little bit annoying.

I find it frustrating because I want characters in Houdini to work. But the truth is that it is not a set up that I can see animating characters in for years at a time.

I truly have no clue how to use the Face Auto-Rig.I don't know if I have to use it when I Auto-Rig the body. Also it would be good to see a basics tutorial on importing rigged characters into other scenes and the issues if you want to import multiples of the same character. I would love to see videos covering these topics…

Thanks for the NFO Guys I will try all that was suggested. No one more then I hopes to get good at their new systems. I instantly fell in love with their new weighting and want to see their rigging tool succeed.