Hello,

I'm searching for a way to import correctly a rig from blender and beeing able to directly add IK chains to it.

Right now when i import a rig from blender, the rig has both bones and a lot of “Null” named transforms.

(one for each bone)


I think those “Null” transforms prevent me to add directly IK chains, am i right?

I watched this tutorial:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-2NERi2cmMs [www.youtube.com]

and tried to create bones directly from houdini, and there no “Null” transforms come in the process.


Is there a way to avoid those “Null” transforms at FBX import?


If not, is there a way i could create bone nodes and set their influences on vertices from a python script?

Part of the problem is that FBX only supports FK style bones. So every time you transfer a rig from Blender into Houdini, you have to “fix it up” and re-animate it. This kind of workflow gets old real quick. A simple way is to just animate in Blender. Let's face it, it is very acceptable to receive an animated character from Maya, so why not from Blender? Both programs will deliver to you in the Alembic or FBX format.

Then you can just pull in the FBX as an Agent and do your Houdini work with the pre-animated character. You can use BlendShapes or the Crowd system to transition between clips.

Creating a bone is pretty simple…
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/23799-create-a-bone-in-python/?tab=comments#comment-139876 [forums.odforce.net]

You'll find a more comprehensive FBX bone manipulator at this link.
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/26669-bvh-tweaker-for-carnegie-mellon-motion-capture/?tab=comments#comment-154056 [forums.odforce.net]

A video tutorial on the subject:
https://vimeo.com/135719987 [vimeo.com]