Before it's getting even more impolite, I want to say thank you guys! I have a lot of crunch-time at the moment, which takes me away from this project. Hope to get some time over the weekend to prep a little scene I want to share that makes more sense than my screenshots. I have a bazillion additional questions, but I don't want to spam this forum, so there was one guy mentioning discord-channels specifically for Houdini-rigging. I can't find them, so besides my problem here I'd really appreciate it if someone could tell me those.
Have a nice weekend ahead!
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Rigging » [KineFX] blendshapes reducing performance a lot
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
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Rigging » [KineFX] blendshapes reducing performance a lot
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
- Offline
Hi!
I'm currently working on my first houdini rig (a simple car-rig) by using kinefx. I've skinned/captured all separate pieces by using a capturepackedgeo node. It's running in real time, but only until I've tried to add 4 blend shapes driving the absorber-springs. I've found no other solution than by separating the springs (base and target) with blasting, creating a blend shape node for each spring and piping this back into the geo using merge. To drive the length of each spring, I'm calculating a normalized custom value within a rig vop and piping this into the blend-channel. How would you set up something like this? Although I'm a beginner in houdini rigging I guess making a separate rig for the springs would help. But maybe I can keep everything as it is (with just one geo) and driving the primitives without blasting. I already tried so, but it seems that since this is a merged geo the vertex order for the base and the target primitive changes which makes it impossible (at least for me) to get it work.
Hope this makes sense.
Thank you!
I'm currently working on my first houdini rig (a simple car-rig) by using kinefx. I've skinned/captured all separate pieces by using a capturepackedgeo node. It's running in real time, but only until I've tried to add 4 blend shapes driving the absorber-springs. I've found no other solution than by separating the springs (base and target) with blasting, creating a blend shape node for each spring and piping this back into the geo using merge. To drive the length of each spring, I'm calculating a normalized custom value within a rig vop and piping this into the blend-channel. How would you set up something like this? Although I'm a beginner in houdini rigging I guess making a separate rig for the springs would help. But maybe I can keep everything as it is (with just one geo) and driving the primitives without blasting. I already tried so, but it seems that since this is a merged geo the vertex order for the base and the target primitive changes which makes it impossible (at least for me) to get it work.
Hope this makes sense.
Thank you!
Edited by Fraenk - Feb. 14, 2024 03:46:03
Rigging » Apex rig IK setup with 5 joints and limiting rotation
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
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Why would you need more than 3 joints for the main-arm (which is the default ik-setup anyway) + using a fk-rotation for the manipulator? You could limit the rotations using clamp-nodes.
Rigging » Apex rig - performance using stash-nodes
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
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Thank you very much tamte and kodra. This helps for understanding quite a lot!
Again, this forum is amazingly supportive.
Again, this forum is amazingly supportive.
Rigging » Apex rig - performance using stash-nodes
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
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Hi! I have to put up front, that I have now 3 weeks rigging-history in Houdini (after 20 years of Maya), so please excuse if I'm not completely precise. I know that there are several different ways of building and adding things to the apex rig-graph (or its sub-components/modules). For example, using an apex component with second input + edit graph, or you unpack the rig and use an edit graph after that (or using a stash) -> repack and pipe this to the next apex component. My question is if it even matters which workaround you're going to use in terms of final rig-performance? So are stash-nodes or direct modifications with unpacked rigs + edit-graphs impacting the speed so that you should use it only for testing things? If I understood this correctly, you can save out the final character to a .bgeo-file. But what exactly contains this .bgeo-file? Is it the whole node-tree starting from the geo-import / skeleton-definition etc to the very last node? Or does this .bgeo holds only all apex-auto rig-components from the first to the last? Or is it something like a "compiled" version of the apex-node-tree-logic?
Hope this makes sense. Thank you!
Hope this makes sense. Thank you!
Edited by Fraenk - Jan. 31, 2024 14:42:14
Rigging » Houdini riggers pool
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
- Offline
Ivan LChristopherRutledge
Definitely encourage people to join in on that! Also might be wise to start a discord or google sheet or something. I have no idea what the deal is with riggers working with houdini in studios, I know a good handful of people who are playing with various kinds of rigging in houdini, but im not sure what exactly studios would be looking for from them at this stage.
There are at least 2 discords out there already or you think there is a benefit of having a separate one?
Would you mind sharing those discord-channels Ivan? Thank you!
Rigging » CaptureLayerPaint-SOP breaks when post-rename joints
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
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Solved it by simply renaming the joints after the weight-paint and done. But thank you so much for this example. I'll check this out right away. It also makes completely sense since in Houdini joints are "just" points right? And not specific transform-type/objects like in Maya.
This forum is so excellent cos all of you wizards are lightning-fast with response and extremely supportive anyway how noob-like the questions are. Thank you!
This forum is so excellent cos all of you wizards are lightning-fast with response and extremely supportive anyway how noob-like the questions are. Thank you!
Edited by Fraenk - Jan. 29, 2024 07:05:17
Rigging » CaptureLayerPaint-SOP breaks when post-rename joints
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
- Offline
Hi,
I'm still trying to adapt my Maya-TD-workflow to Houdini by learning Apex and KineFX which in general works great. Although there are still some hick ups where I'm not sure if I did something wrong, or it's a bug, or it's just the wrong way of thinking. Anyway ... I was weight painting a simple tube with just 3 joints using the CaptureLayerPaint-SOP. Life was good until renaming the joints of my skeleton -> all the weights are broken. This surprises me to be honest cos I thought to do something simple like a renaming (which happens quite some time when prototyping) especially with all the proceduralism in mind. But again ... I'm pretty sure I DID something wrong.
Thank you so much again!
Best wishes
Frank
I'm still trying to adapt my Maya-TD-workflow to Houdini by learning Apex and KineFX which in general works great. Although there are still some hick ups where I'm not sure if I did something wrong, or it's a bug, or it's just the wrong way of thinking. Anyway ... I was weight painting a simple tube with just 3 joints using the CaptureLayerPaint-SOP. Life was good until renaming the joints of my skeleton -> all the weights are broken. This surprises me to be honest cos I thought to do something simple like a renaming (which happens quite some time when prototyping) especially with all the proceduralism in mind. But again ... I'm pretty sure I DID something wrong.
Thank you so much again!
Best wishes
Frank
Edited by Fraenk - Jan. 29, 2024 06:17:19
Rigging » [Apex Graph] transformobject-node issue with rotation
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
- Offline
Thank you very much for the fast reply and after converting the rotation-outputs to radians -> multiplying with the gear-ratio and converting back from rad to deg all is fine. I could of course simply connect the xyz-rotation-channels directly, but when you gonna multiply it with a value you are facing those pops (at least I did). Anyway ... maybe I did something else wrong.
Your apex-anim-scene-debug wrapper sounds exactly what I was looking for. Thank you VERY much again, I'll test it out asap!
All the best!
Your apex-anim-scene-debug wrapper sounds exactly what I was looking for. Thank you VERY much again, I'll test it out asap!
All the best!
Rigging » [Apex Graph] transformobject-node issue with rotation
- Fraenk
- 10 posts
- Offline
Hello there, I'm coming from Maya and trying to get used to Apex by creating a simple gear rig with some different ratios. For testing-purposes, I'm using a stash-node where I'm manually putting stuff together:
1. I set up 3 transform-joints for each gear
2. getting the driver-rotation by "exploding" the transform matrix
3. extracting the desired rotation axis -> multiplying it with the gear-ratio -> piping the value into a new transform that then connects to the point-transform
That works in general, but I'm facing pops on the driven rotation -> driven geo pops back every 180 degrees -> I guess this is due to
the fact that the internal rotation representation is radians right? It's a simple and maybe trivial question, but I can't find anything in the docs. Also is there a way to output values to the console or "watch" them in Geo-Spreadsheed-viewer?
Thank you very much!
1. I set up 3 transform-joints for each gear
2. getting the driver-rotation by "exploding" the transform matrix
3. extracting the desired rotation axis -> multiplying it with the gear-ratio -> piping the value into a new transform that then connects to the point-transform
That works in general, but I'm facing pops on the driven rotation -> driven geo pops back every 180 degrees -> I guess this is due to
the fact that the internal rotation representation is radians right? It's a simple and maybe trivial question, but I can't find anything in the docs. Also is there a way to output values to the console or "watch" them in Geo-Spreadsheed-viewer?
Thank you very much!
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