I was wondering if there is similar to trax editor, like in Maya but for Houdini?

CHOPS!

chunks/blocks are way too simplistic anyway

in fact I found working with chops much more fun than trax editor…

xcomb
I was wondering if there is similar to trax editor, like in Maya but for Houdini?

Like everybody have said before:
CHOPS CHOPS CHOPS!!!!!!
Take a look at Composite CHOP, Sequence CHOP, Blend CHOP, etc …

My 2 cents.

I love CHOPs but using it as an animation editor makes me cry. Its great at filtering, processing and to some degrees mixing animation but it lacks a good interface for editing different clips together. Its doable with the Shift CHOP and the Trim CHOP along with the Blend and Composite CHOPs, but the lack of a modern editing GUI is a hinderance.

All the above applies for COPs too. You can edit image sequences but the lacking GUI makes it quite tough.

Very sad, i love maya's trax editor, i thought i could find it in Houdini, but i will take a look at Chops, thanks!

yeah, CHOPs definately work better with procedural tasks. I think the interface is great for what it does, if Houdini was to add clip-block-editing I would think it would go in the animation tools/dope sheet and not in Chops.

The really great thing that CHOPs does have going for it in the animation-block editing department would be it's ability to use triggers.

For instance, the user could

set up different animations of varying lengths with the character and import all the different channels into chops, then use a “trigger” or a one sample spike to determine when that channel will start playing. Yes a trigger could be entered manually, but the way Houdini/Chops works is that this could be created out of just about any type of event or condition.

The value of the trigger could determine what animation would play. The animation could even be scaled so that it finishes exactly when the next trigger starts, or blends to the next sequence.

This of course would take more setup but that's what DA's are for. A few things out of the box that could work would be the Trigger, Copy, Shift, Trim, Stretch, and Lookup.

here's an example (animation is generated based on music)

http://www.andrew-lowell-productions.com/andrew-lowell-productions/download/02_valueControlledTargeting_VelocityBlendIntensity_RandomLoopSelection.mov [andrew-lowell-productions.com]

Pretty neat!
I do that stuff in MotionBuilder, for triggering animations.
But unfortunatly, i can't transfer my animation stuff from either MB or Maya to Houdini and have automatic joint setup. i am not the type of user to have obj to sequence geometry, seems i miss a lot, when i have no control over particular application.
I know i am picky about it, but that's the life of animators to have everything ready to animate
Cuz i really can make lots of hard stuff in MB, and interactivly use that in Maya with fbx.

maybe the collada import options could work?

I'll give a try, thank you!

yeah if you could get that to work you could do the animation loops in trax or MB, and then apply great CHOP filters like blending and bluring once it's in Houdini.

You might also want to check out Houdini's rigging features, I think the rigging/skinning stuff in Houdini is way ahead of Max, not sure about Maya

Its me again and my crazy ideas.

No trax editor? Just add IN/OUT temporal controls to all houdini ops. Make an interface for editing this visualy and make animation curves visible also one at the time or be smart and do something better.

Blending edit sops with nice visual control? no problem. Adding a polysplit Sop that is active only on some frames? no problem.

having objects with temporaly changing topology? yes sir.

PS. Yes I'm an utopian in nature….and also desire world peace

:wink: