Alastair from Glassworks here.
Considering our options

Elegant and easy to use animation and rigging tools is one consideration for us. Can anyone allay my fears that these tools are not part of Houdini's arsenal?

Thanks

Honestly, I find the rigging system to be more than adequate for bipeds and quadrapeds right out of the box. And, it's pretty easy to customize. Very similar to jeremie passerin's gearrigging system, with the ability to use components to make custom rigs. Also, the muscle system is very easy to use, giving me great results with large bulky meshes.
And, once you are done, you get to use mantra, which is much closer to Arnold and vray than to mental delay. Subsurface scattering and displacement maps are built into the standard shader. The hair system is fantastic too. Renders beautifully.

I was working for a studio in which we considered Houdini as pipeline base.

Back then we ended up in the conclusion that the playbackspeed was just way to slow as soon as you got a full rigged character or lets say 2-3 characters.

Has there been any speed improvement in that field ? (that testing was done like 3 years ago)

cheers Mario

The autorig creates a great proxy rig for fast animation quickly for you. The playback speed is not too bad at all. Pretty snappy for m. The new open gl 3.3 standard should fix much of the slow interface.

hi alastair,

i'm not a rigger or animator but i can give you some links that maybe help you.

free tutorial on sidefx:
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1859&Itemid=257 [sidefx.com]

a custom rig for a snake:
http://www.authorityfx.com/the-making-of-piranhaconda/ [authorityfx.com]

someone made a Craft Asset in Houdini there will be a CMIVFX Video Tutorial:
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/19260-craft-houdini-tools-it-is-animation-tools-for-vehicles/ [forums.odforce.net]

there are also tutorials on cmivfx and 3dbuzz…

Hello Mario Reitbauer,

Normally, yes. 2-3 months ago, someone posted a comparaison between maya vs houdini in terms of animation speed of several rigs. The performance issue was the viewport. Maybe, the next release.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_forum&Itemid=172&page=viewtopic&t=30310&highlight=maya [sidefx.com]

Hi Alastair, welcome

The rigging system in Houdini is actually better than XSI or Maya, yep, weird but true…

When using the auto rig don't judge performance based on it as it is a very sophisticated rig that imho does not showcase how well the software performs.

True, Maya is faster, XSI too, but houdini is very scalable and you can really push it far without the need of constant RnD support.

The animation toolset is not as good though but I am making noise about it and I am sure they will be there sooner than we think.

I would suggest you to talk to them and stress how vital it is because they do listen and move quick.

cheers.

jordibares
I would suggest you to talk to them and stress how vital it is because they do listen and move quick.

cheers.

Absolutely.

Hi all,

I feel that rigging and weighting are a bit slower in Houdini compared to XSI, but weighting especially is much more predictable and easier to handle in Houdini.

And what about other aspects like motion retargeting (MOTOR), motion plotting (Animate->Tools-> Plot), deep character referencing and animation layering? Those features are absolutely crucial for a team of animators to work in parallel.

Also, is there a reference on how to build muscle based facial rig in Houdini?

Thanks.

Cheers,

I don't remember how many times I have been explaining people how good is Houdini's procedural approach for rigging.
It's a pity that SESI couldn't put more resources into the characters toolset, I remember explaining some rigs at The Mill some years ago, good times Jordi, to SI TDs and they were really impressed, as many people in our industry though Houdini was only used for particles.
One thing I'm pretty sure, the next release will have serious improvements in the animation/rigging area, and this new wave of users interested about Houdini is going to be great to encourage SESI.

Allow me a stable way to paint weights on wire captures. That would be heaven.

phrenzy84
Allow me a stable way to paint weights on wire captures. That would be heaven.

Very true, I wonder if the problems with some of the viewport states are due to the internals issues with the current viewport architecture.

Thanks for all your info. We'll put it in our pipe and smoke it and see what occurs. There are some positive encouraging noises for sure , we'll just need to get our hands on it and see.

Alastair
Glassworks