Thanks for the NFO Guys I will try all that was suggested. No one more then I hopes to get good at their new systems. I instantly fell in love with their new weighting and want to see their rigging tool succeed.

McNistor
If you don't mind me answering your question too, I'd say - a bit of facial rigging, techniques aimed at both cartoon as well as realistic, if time permits.

Same here. I'm coming from 3ds Max, and was impressed with the improved rigging tools in H16, but there is precious little about facial rigging, online.

It would be nice to see a facial rig component to the new Auto-Rigger, similar to what you see in some of Blender's auto-rigger addons. This is a good example. You see an auto-rig for the face about midway into the video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLmiE1_HBZQ&t=91s [www.youtube.com]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTbIk5tz5-k&t=766s [www.youtube.com]

The Face Rig portion is early in this video:
https://cloud.blender.org/p/blenrig/57343500c379cf109d9e4ecc [cloud.blender.org]

Don Nash
Same here. I'm coming from 3ds Max, and was impressed with the improved rigging tools in H16, but there is precious little about facial rigging, online.

It would be nice to see a facial rig component to the new Auto-Rigger, similar to what you see in some of Blender's auto-rigger addons. This is a good example. You see an auto-rig for the face about midway into the video:

thanks I'll have a look.

Live rigging Twitch stream: Cult of Rig

https://www.twitch.tv/cultofrig [www.twitch.tv]

Overview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVik-LpFbng [www.youtube.com]

Website with the recordings:
http://www.cultofrig.com [www.cultofrig.com]

Hey everybody!

I've been looking into Houdini for about a week now using the apprentice version, and I am really loving it so far and looking forward to learning more about it as in depth as possible. So basically what I am doing now is looking to cover all the bases of my own personal 3D knowledge, acquired using other packages over the years, with Houdini, and evaluating if it definitely wins me over to use it in the future for work.

So investigating about the rigging subject has brought me to this thread, which I find truly interesting. There have been quite a lot of rigging topics mentioned so far that I also would love to be able to have more in depth tutorials about (specific to Houdini), but my personal number one interest would be, as LKruel had mentioned, to be able to pull off a UE4 skeleton round-trip, since if I knew this is doable in Houdini (with a reasonable amount of hassle I guess, but not too much), I would have total piece of mind in converting to Houdini as my primary package.

Being able to use the stock animations in UE4 for any custom characters I create in Houdini (in the future) would be a huge asset for me, and would definitely allow me to rest assured that I must switch to Houdini without further hesitation

Hello everybody!
I am a new houdini user and i have been trying my best to learn houdini as much as i can, it is an amazing software!

I have been playing around with some of the rigging tools and i think they are amazing. Thank you Arctor for the amazing auto-rigger! Loving it!

my adventures from Houdini to Unreal:
When it comes to game engines, usually a single hierarchy is preferred for this environment. I have tried to export the SimpleFemale to Unreal and it worked properly. I also exported a spider rig i made and it also worked properly. But i noticed that i can't make houdini export the rig with ONLY the single hierarchy bones & geo, instead i get extra unwanted nulls and stuff.

I also tried to export a character using the auto-rigger and found some issues in Unreal:
Error, Could not import geo_skin
Duplicate bone name found('R_Hand_ikspikeall') Each bone must have a unique name
Multiple roots found
!Get import Data has failed.

I have a suggestion to fix ALL the issues for Houdini to Unreal character FBX workflow but I lack experience and technical knowledge to try it myself:
I suggest having a secondary single hierarchy shadow rig (like Softimage XSI) that is constrained to the fancy animation rig but works in parallel to the fancy anim rig and ONLY mirrors it's movements and captures biharmonic tetrahedralisation skin and has low bone count. Maybe we can have this option implemented in the new auto-rigger?
REFERENCE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIGvHiLyBbI [www.youtube.com]

Maybe my suggestion is useless, but I would love to see someone take a crack at it. maybe the shadow rig can have it's own HDA/subnet?

eitch
Maybe my suggestion is useless, but I would love to see someone take a crack at it. maybe the shadow rig can have it's own HDA/subnet?

no suggestion is useless…as long as it lives here:
https://www.sidefx.com/bugs/submit/ [www.sidefx.com]

thanks

Then live there it shall
Sorry i am new to these lovely forums.
I am a big fan of your work arctor, and of SideFX!!! thank you for the amazing auto-rigger! it rocks!

glad you like it - lots of room for improvement so anytime you have a suggestion feel free to mention it on the forums - but make an RFE also since that's the only way we can keep track of things.

eitch
I have a suggestion to fix ALL the issues for Houdini to Unreal character FBX workflow but I lack experience and technical knowledge to try it myself:
I suggest having a secondary single hierarchy shadow rig (like Softimage XSI) that is constrained to the fancy animation rig but works in parallel to the fancy anim rig and ONLY mirrors it's movements and captures biharmonic tetrahedralisation skin and has low bone count. Maybe we can have this option implemented in the new auto-rigger?
REFERENCE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIGvHiLyBbI [www.youtube.com]

Maybe my suggestion is useless, but I would love to see someone take a crack at it. maybe the shadow rig can have it's own HDA/subnet?

That's what I did when I was exploring Houdini -> UE4 character workflow a couple years ago. I had an animation rig which baked rotations onto a bare-bones “shadow rig” via CHOPs. It worked but obviously it wasn't a great workflow.

Hey!

Here's a little shelf tool script I knocked up thinking about the issue of FBX export and the ‘shadow rig’ idea.
I'm also slightly in the dark re rig requirements for games, but I'm working on it

There would be quite a few things left to do on the tool to make it truly worthy, but see if it's along the right lines. When running the tool you'll get prompted to choose an operator, the operator you're looking for is the final deform so in your rig. Select that and you should get a ‘shadow rig’ spat out in /obj. Which should export nicely to fbx (not including the fact that the fbx imports the nulls at a very large scale)

Cheers!
Henry

Hey friedasparagus!
Your tool really did the trick !!! BRILLIANT!
I copied the python stuff and pasted them in a new tool in the shelf and it worked like a charm (i couldn't figure out how to import the .shelf)
I tried it on a skinned mesh and it looks like the animations and the skeletons are working perfectly, also the bone hierarchy in unreal looks so clean it allows for easy re-targeting!
I thank you from the bottom of my heart
Stellar Script indeed!!!

You know,friedasparagus, your script is really cool because it also gives the animator free control over the root motion since the null at the root is free, i easily add keyframe root motion animation. You just made my day with your awesome script works flawlessly with the new auto-rigging tools and even with custom rigs (tested on both)
thank you so much!!!!!

Hey eitch,

I'm really happy it's working for you

There is one hitch in the tool that I just clocked - the ‘Get World Trasform’ chop that I create for each shadow object is fetching the ‘pre-constraint transform’ of each node in the source rig. This is (I believe) how the constraints are designed to work. However, that means that if the source rig has nodes in the ‘skinning’ hierarchy that have chop based constraints applied to them, this will not be reflected in the shadow rig…

The fix is to replace the Get World Transform chop with a transform wrangle that calls optransform(source_rig_node_path) and set the matrix that way. The optransform method returns the objects world transform matrix after any constraints have been applied, that way it should works for rigs that use constraints too.

I'll post the updated tool when I've got that changed!

Ok, here's the updated version…

It includes the above-mentioned fix as well as another improvement which is that it now no longer requires the original rig to be in rest position. This is done by grabbing the weights from the selected deform SOP's input and then transferring the deformed point positions to the shadow_geo (necessary because it's very common for the deform SOP to be set to ‘Delete Capture Attributes’, the auto-rig is setup this way).

Performing the capture correct after this step sets the whatever the current pose is as the ‘capture pose’. So then all subsequent deformations to the shadow_geo will take place *from* this point. Meaning bones and deformed geometry will always match up.

This could be handy if you're working with an already animated asset, that you don't want to mess about duplicating or resetting channels on to retrieve the rest position (I am really, really lazy )

Nulls also have their display scale set to something hopefully more sensible.

There is now a great collection of rigging tutorials by Bjørn Blaabjerg Sørensen which show how to rig a cat from scratch. You can find the lessons here:

https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/cat-quad-rigging/ [www.sidefx.com]

Now Houdini is complete to my production.
Mr Bjørn Blaabjerg Sørensen told this is a partner with SideFX thank you too.
I love this company

Thank you so much friedasparagus for the awesome shadowrig script! Its so epic! I ♥ IT!!
Mr Bjørn Blaabjerg Sørensen has some amazing tutorials indeed.
Speaking of Mr Bjørn Blaabjerg Sørensen, on his website he has a tutorial for blendshapes in houdini using the blendshape node. He does it in a maya style set driven key way, which isn't really an attractive way for me to go about it.
So I was wondering, is there a way to do it with nodes?
I have an example in this link:
http://softimage.tv/ice-facial-rig-shapes-approach/ [softimage.tv]

Hey eitch,

Here's a possible quick setup for replicating the approach you linked to - try not to pay too much attention to my painstakingly crafted blendshapes here

There's two versions in there (inside /obj/tommy/chopnet1), the orange network box is the one that most closely matches the SI version, the green network box is a one-node vex version. See what you make of it.
Cheers!

EDIT: Oops! In order for the behaviour to be identical between the two versions you'd have to move the math chop upstream of the limit chop nodes - at the moment the limit is placed before the multiplier is applied (which means the min/max values are -85 and 85!)

friedasparagus, you are my Herodini