2D artist here - I am considering buying the Houdini FX version in order to get finally into vfx and animations. I was actually first looking at Maya and C4D, however after realizing how powerful Houdini is it might be the better choice for me. However there are still some questions I hope some staff member or Houdini user can answer. I realize that some of those questions are laughable, but they are really important to me before hitting that 7k purchase button

1.) I have invested quite some money into Daz characters/props and would like to use them with Houdini. As far as I can tell, importing them is possible (fbx/obj/mdd), followed by rigging them and re-texturing in order to work with Arnold, Redshift or Vray within Houdini. Does Houdini provide any tools to fix skin-collision / deformation when the character is animated? Similar to the ‘Delta Mush Deformer’ in Maya?

2.) Facial Rigs and Animation - Are blendshapes imported to Houdini or do I have to create them manually? For example ‘smile’, ‘lefteye_closed’ etc. Or do I have to import every blendshape manually? I am asking because I'd like to use facial mocap to animate a characters face within Houdini via Facecap, something already demonstrated in this video: https://vimeo.com/242460460 [vimeo.com] Would I be right to assume that I have to create 52 blendshapes of my character in Daz and then import them separately into Houdini?

Furthermore, is there any tutorial that explains how to do a complete face rig with sliders and connecting the corresponding fields to facial mocap data? That would be very useful for my purposes.

3.) If let's say importing a character that has hair/clothes, can the dynamics be edited (gravity, weightmaps, etc) or do I need to export those items one by one? I recently watched a Houdini tutorial of a user creating dynamics for a shirt on a male character doing a walking animation. It took him over 40 minutes to set everything up - generally speaking, is it really such a painstaking process when working with clothing (fitting, aligning, dynamics).

The hair question is more or less the same. I have over 120 hair-models that I can export - can Houdini make them act like hair (dynamics, wind, movement etc)?

I realise some of the questions might sound stupid, please bare with me.

Best Regards,
George

Well, over the past 3 days i more or less found answers to all those questions myself and had the opportunity to play around with the free version to get a feel for the software. I will post updates to this thread for people that will do the same as me in the future and especially people who google “Daz+Houdini” and come up with zero results

First impression - wow! Even with zero experience it took me just an hour to figure out how to do some simple animations with vellum, like a cloth falling over a rigid object and simulating the cloth, or simulating collisions etc. However I soon realised that it will be next to impossible to just load a character and start animating it - Houdini is not a ‘traditional’ application, especially if you're coming from Daz, Maya or C4D.

I imported a naked Daz model, as fbx, just to see how it looks like. By modifying the relevant import/export dialogs I was able to import a da character, fully rigged (bones). After another couple of hours I figured out how to add some missing textures, rendered it in Mantra and voila - the first small achievement. However that was short lived when trying to pose the character. Yes, the skeleton is there, but it's not attached to the skin, and google wasn't helpful at all. I managed at some point to bake it and make some simple movements that resulted in bad bad deformations. That's when I realised that it's not going to be easy and I should first get a better feel for the software before trying something so complex as animating a character.

I decided to look up any tutorial I can find and start replicating it, in order to understand Houdini better. I started with the ones at SideFX first, however released soon that there is a bigger problem I didn't anticipate. The Houdini version. If you start following and replicating tutorials for a version under 17 while using 17.5, you might hit a wall as an inexperienced user. For example, there is quite a big amount of tutorials on Houdini 15, however a lot of the variables/methods/workflows are now different in 17+, which makes those tutorials still valid in terms of logic, but impossible to just follow along and recreate them.

The documentation is your friend
This is not Ikea - the documentation is really helpful and more or less updated to 17.5 - There is no way around, you have to read it, keep it open, read it again and again. Remember studying Kafka in High School? It can't be worse than that.

I believe I figured out a good way to make the whole learning process easier and not as boring as reading Kafka.

1. Google for *.hid scene files, there are a lot of demo files that Houdini artists are sharing for the community. They are usually complemented with a demo, so pick easy ones first. Simple shapes, geometry.
2. Open the scene file and don't change parameters to ‘play around’, no matter how much you want to do it.
3. Look at the structure/node network, which functions are used in this file and search for each and every one of them in the documentation and read what it does. Also don't forget the code, put it in a cheat-sheet and remind yourself what it does.
4. After fully understanding how that scene file was done, try to recreate it yourself starting from scratch.
5. Once you did that for two scene files, try to combine them. Or create an animation where one is dependent on the other. That way you really test the knowledge you've just learned.

I did this yesterday for 16 hours and I really learned not just some of the functions, but also the interface, short-keys etc. It all happens organically, give yourself time.

I will do that for the next 14 days, each day, 16 hours. I'll report back in after that.

To all the pro's here - I realize this thread might look very silly and amateurish, but it's really hard if you're just starting out and I'd like to help people that are in the same stage by sharing my process, step by step - because all I've heard so far from other forums is ‘it’s impossible','you're wasting your time' and ‘you should download blender’. It might be hard, but not impossible. Hopefully this thread will someday prove that.

George out.

i think the Ikea's documentation is also helpful,haha

The last 3 days were a blast! I went through several in-depth tutorials, but one I can really recommend is “The Gnomon Workshop - Introduction into Houdini”. Not sure if I am allowed to link to it because it's paid, so use google. It took me a full day to go through it and recreate it and it covers so many topics. I already have my eyes on on other tutorials from the same instructor.

There are some other links I'd like to share to make beginners their life easier and waste less time on google:

1) http://tokeru.com/cgwiki/index.php?title=HoudiniGettingStarted [tokeru.com]
This guy has build a wiki with a lot of examples, explanations and hip files you can download - also the way he explains things is very detailed and it's free. He also has some advanced sections.

2) Just go on Vimeo and search for houdini. You will find dozens of artists and instructors that share scene files that you can then reverse-engineer. Some people that ‘pop-out’ and are recommended to explore are Dokai Tutorials, Nick Taylor, C.H. Motion, Lewen Hu, Alexander Golubeff, Fabricio Chamon, LucaScheller, Farmfield, Atom, geoff tomkinson, Rob Whitworth and of course the official SideFX account.

3) https://www.orbolt.com/ [www.orbolt.com]
This place has a lot of assets, pops, rops, some free and some paid that you can use in Houdini. Some are outdated and for earlier versions of HD, but some of them could make your life much easier in the current version, especially if you want to automate things a little.

4) https://forums.odforce.net [forums.odforce.net]
A forum for Houdini users. It is not very active, however there is a lot of information and answers to problems you might come across, which makes it a perfect addition to the official forum here. Some people there are very helpful. They also have job-listings, and judging by the job posts it seems like Houdini VFX people are in demand like crazy. That helps motivating you, trust me.


There is much more I'd like to share, but thats a good start, at least it will keep me going for weeks to come. I might do a wiki one day, just focused on HD resources.

—

Something important:

Every time I learn a particular function, or reverse engineer a scene I put that same scene into a spread sheet and write up ‘real-life examples’ how I could use that function. So that way in future, let's say when working on my own scene I can easily find references. Let's say we've learned from a scene how a line is colliding with and then deforming an object and we have the simulation - that could be ‘walking on grass’ or ‘car crash’ - you get the idea. Trust me, once you go through dozens of tutorials and scene files you forget and you find yourself in that ‘how did i create this a week ago’ - a clean spreadsheet and perfect file-management will help.

—

It's amazing how so many people would not touch Houdini with a 10 foot pole because of the learning curve. I believe they are wrong. While it's demanding and somewhat complicated at times, once you understand something it actually not that hard. After just a week of 16h/day training I already got used to the interface and logic. And the more I work with it, the more I love it. Needless to say that my significant other is not so happy about me spending night and day in front of the computer, but thats a different story

Cheers,
G

I have worked with DAZ- or similar “game-style” characters. While it is possible to get them over into Houdini (you can even get the Hires-versions from DAZ, which are basically subdivided versions with additional deformations, probably from displacement information) over and keep the rigs' weightmaps intact (contrary to what is said on the DAZ forums, this is absolutely possible).

If you want to keep the DAZ rig you have to put in some work though, since one uses joints, the other uses bones. You can set up a CHOP net or use a helper rig, but - as like in most software packages - additional nodes bog down Houdini dramatically and make any “real-time-animation” impossible.

Cloth: In most cases those look incredibly bad in the DAZ world anyway. The best you can do with it is to subdivide it and use one of Houdini's dynamic simulations to make the best of it.

Inter-penetration-protection: Possible in Houdini, but not quite out of the box. This depends on how you set up your rigs and your animation needs. One situation may work best with corrective morphs, another with a muscle setup and a third with some dynamic simulation. I don't see a silver bullet here and I am not impressed by the “one size fits it all” other packages offer. The results usually are works-in-the-lab (and nowhere else).

Hair: You can use DAZ hair products as guide/generation helpers for Houdini's hair systems. Recent versions of Houdini have a set of game-developer tools that allow you to convert higher quality hair into texture mapped objects, which I would consider helpful for the animation step, as it is much faster to deal with.

This obviously can only reflect my subjective perspective. You may find that Houdini is a toolbox that MAKES you find your own point of view pretty quickly

Marc

@Marc, thanks a lot for your answer, I always knew that there has to be a way to import (and export) those characters correctly, even if that means doing a lot of field-work. I don't mind spending days on adjusting a rig and making it perfect, especially when it comes to hero characters.

It's funny, just yesterday I was searching for a way to assign materials to groups for an obj and I came across your tutorial (https://vimeo.com/208061133) which helped me out a lot What a small world.

/G