Houdini 22.0 Nodes Geometry nodes

Labs Dem Bones Skinning Converter geometry node

Dem Bones Skinning Converter is a SOP that can convert any non-changing topology deforming mesh sequence into a bone based animation.

This node type is hidden. It is no longer supported.

Dem Bones - © Electronic Arts 2019

This tool is an implementation of Smooth Skinning Decomposition with Rigid Bones, an automated algorithm to extract the Linear Blend Skinning (LBS) with bone transformations from a set of example meshes. Skinning Decomposition can be used in various tasks:

  1. Converting any animated mesh sequence, e.g. geometry cache, to LBS, which can be replayed in popular game engines.

  2. Solving skinning weights from shapes and skeleton poses, e.g. converting blendshapes to LBS.

  3. Solving bone transformations for a mesh animation given skinning weights.

Note

This tool only handles clean input data, i.e. only one piece of connected geometry. If the tool takes a really long time to process, the tool has probably gotten stuck finding a solution. To fix, set the Min Non-Zero Weights parameter to 1.

Note

Replaced by Dem Bones Skinning Converter SOP. To be removed in Houdini 23.0.

Parameters

Convert and Export

Starts the skinning decomposition and exports the result to disk.

Export File

The path used to save the output FBX.

Frame Range

This is the frame range used for the skinning decomposition.

Bind Pose Frame

This is the frame that will be used as the bind/rest pose for the output rig.

Bones

Max Number of Bones

The maximum number of bones that will get generated. Note that the actual output might be lower than the number specified here, due to more efficient solutions being found during conversion.

Solve Iterations

Global Iterations

Number of global iterations to be processed during conversion. Functions as a scalar for the number of optimizations that have to be calculated. Increase for more complex scenes.

Error Tolerance

The algorithm will keep track of the decreasing error during iterations, and will increment a counter if the reduction is less than this threshold. This allows the algorithm to stop optimizing early, if no improvement has been found after the number of specified iterations in the Patience parameter.

Patience

The number of iterations to wait before stopping early when no improvement has been found that is incrementally better than the threshold specified in the Error Tolerance parameter.

Splitting Iterations

The number of clustering update iterations to be applied during initialization. Usually doesn’t need tweaking.

Transform Iterations

Number of bone transformation update iterations per global iteration. DemBones performs multiple bone trans update after each weights update.

Soft Constraints

Translations Affinity

This soft constraint forces bone translation following the centroid of the patch supported by that bone. A lot of use-cases would require value of 0 (no constraint). Upper bound value depends on numerical stability and whether optimization can converge or not.

P-Norm

The power used to compute centroid of the patch above. Higher value will move the centroid of the bones closer to the vertices with max weights (soft-max).

Weights

Weights Iterations

Dem Bones performs multiple weights updates after each bone updates. These iterations are quite expensive, and usually 1-5 iterations produce good results. It is better to increase the Global Iterations than to increase this number.

Smoothness

Controls the weights smoothness for the generated soft constraint. Usually does not need to be modified.

Step Size

Step size for the weights smoothness soft constraint. It’s the step size of the Implicit Laplacian smoothing on the weights.

Min Non-Zero Weights

Specifies the number of non-zero weights per vertex required for the conversion to succeed.

Geometry nodes