I'm having a huge amount of difficulty wrapping my head around this. The rig I have built here should be working, but its not. The Leg bends to the left instead of going up and forward when I raise the foot, and lowering the creature at the hip in Negative Y creates this very warped effect, and does not bring the character down into a bend at all.

Clearly I am doing something wrong but i cant figure out what. Trying to learn rigging in Houdini is proving very frustrating, I've done this before in Maya but having no luck here. I want to make this work but if I cant I will have to seitch back to Maya. Any help greatly appreciated.

Hi Brad, it looks like your leg joints are not oriented properly for IK. Houdini is pickier than Maya about this. You're going to want to rotate them so that when you rotate the hip in +x, the hip goes moves backward. This means your right hip needs to be rotated -90 degrees in the Z axis, and your left hip needs to be rotated +90 degrees.

yep - have a quick look through this:
https://www.sidefx.com/learn/collections/rigging-series/ [www.sidefx.com]

Thank you Aerys and michael, I will look into this tutorial series.