Hi all,

I have a few questions about houdini and its possibilites, because i cant find any videos or more accurate informations.

A) What about houdini character rigging and atypical Characters - i mean 4 Arms and legs with a “bonus joint” - is it real to rig and skin it smoothly? Or characters like octopus. I read that muscles works realy well even with right anatomy deformations. But what about automatical shaking muscles during animation - if character is fat ?

B) What about groups of characters - is there any solver to makind crowds ? Like bipeds and delegates in 3ds max. If not is there any possibility to export rig and skin data smoothly to another program ?

C) I would like to know something about whole pipeline - you created characters in houdini, animate it - even with clothes and then ? Houdini Can work with vray and render farms ? Or houdini can export data to some another prog for render ?

I know thats many questions - but 4000 dollars is also many. Thank you for informations.

oh i am sorry i finded pipeline diagram - so i would like to ask only A and B

A: Houdini has powerfull autorig tools, you can create a custom autorig just by placing as many arms/legs as you like and combine them.
Its also really easy to setup jiggly motion with houdini's muscle system.

B: In Houdini it is possible to create crowdsims, basically everything you can think of is most likely possible inside Houdini. Thats what I love about Houdini you can do everything you can think of in many different ways.. its really flexible.

If you want to give rigging a chance in Houdini I recommend these tutorials:

http://vimeo.com/59682352 [vimeo.com]

https://www.3dbuzz.com/training/bundle/houdini-rigging-bundle [3dbuzz.com]

I bought these, they're really nice.

There are also these two dvd's, they should be nice but I have not got my hands on these yet:

https://www.3dbuzz.com/training/view/h9-advanced-character-rigging/character-setup-limb-control [3dbuzz.com]

https://www.3dbuzz.com/training/view/houdini-character-rigging-2/spinal-setup-control [3dbuzz.com]

https://www.3dbuzz.com/training/bundle/houdini-rigging-bundle [3dbuzz.com]

johnycore: thank you very much.

I have the lask question. Is there any problem to rig a detailed armor no clothes - about clothes in houdini I read ver much, but steel detail armor with many parts ?? because id 3ds max is almost imposible to setup it right. I mean every leather belt and so on.

Or setup special type of rig like robot?

You can basically create any kind of rig in any 3D application you like, in my opinion Houdini has the advantage of solving problems in a non linear way.
For example you can merge the animated object to a new SOP and go nuts with tweaking everything aftwards, or while animating.

Take a look at this for example:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RRqQqPurTbs [youtube.com]

For complex armor parts I suppose houdini would not be a problem in handling very complex collisions you can either uses SOP or DOP for this..