What is KineFX?

KineFX is a rigging and animation framework and toolset that allows you to create and edit characters all at the geometry-level. You can use special KineFX SOPs and regular stock Houdini SOPs together to edit imported characters and animation or create your own KineFX characters from scratch.

• For definitions of KineFX terminology, see the Glossary.

What is procedural rigging?

The KineFX framework is built on the principles of procedural rigging. Procedural rigging allows you to iterate on your rigs quickly, experiment non-destructively, and explore set-ups without having to fear that you will break anything like you would with a static graph system. For example, with KineFX you can reconfigure a rig while animating, delete entire parts of an animated hierarchy and not lose its capture (skin) or animation, or unparent all your points and retain their positions (world space transforms).

With KineFX, joint data is simpler, the transform model is simpler, your input stream is always there and you will never lose your original data, everything by default lives in world space (but it is easy to switch between world and local), and the framework is attribute-driven by nature.

What is animation retargeting?

Retargeting is the process by which you take the animation from one character and transfer it to a different character.

Since KineFX is a robust and flexible system, it can handle many possible differences in morphology and hierarchical structure between the source and target characters.