Dear Houdini Community,

I just figured out the fundamental difference between Bone-Based and Joined-Based animation. I want to switch completely to Houdini from Maya for all content-creation for my Unreal Engine-Project, but exporting Characters animated inside Houdini with the available tools into Unreal creates very weird Skeletal-Hierarchies.

First I’ve written with the FBX Sdk a script to clean up the exported skeleton but, it does not work very well. After that, I tried to create a clean Bone Hierarchy in a subnet inside Houdini with references and fetches to the Autorig created Skeleton, but it’s just to complicated: E.g. If you create a simple IK bone Hierarchy with 3 bones and capture geometry with it, import it as fbx in Unreal you will get 2 root notes, which can be cleaned up via a script, but the first bone will be exported as joint at the same position as the root node and de third bone will be where the second bone is in Houdini. Finally, there is an end_effector and goal joint which do not capture the geometry…at the end you cannot see the 3rd bone in Unreal, respectively there is no joint, which can be controlled. I know there has been some discussions here, and I understand it relies on the Bone-Based vs. Joint-Based issue. (this is a similar topic: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/48366/?page=1 [www.sidefx.com] )

Does anyone have a hint how I can tackle this issue more elegantly: animate in Houdini export as fbx to Unreal and have sth similar coming from a joint-based animation tool? Or should I just wait for some upcoming magical fbx export features ;-)

Thank you,
Arvid