Hey Jordi,
Fancy seeing you here!
(For those of you who don't know - we work together).
jordibares
Now, the bad news;
If you want to apply destructive curve operations like in Softimage I am afraid Houdini does not provide that functionality and here is where you can choose, do it as I explained, procedurally friendly, or (you guessed) you can run a script to do the job like in XSI. This is when you may want to write code.
I just want to add that there are ways of editing mocap data without programming (if I understand you correctly). You can directly edit per key-frame CHOP channels - but that is obviously painful due to a key every frame. However, there are workarounds (there *always* is in Houdini). You can turn a channel into a spline (will re-sample) and edit directly in CHOPs. Or, you can add/multiply/replace you own key-framed channel(s) over any other CHOP channel(s).
In fact CHOPs are amazing. It's not just for manipulating key-framed data. CHOPs is in fact general purpose signal processing framework. ie, the data channels can be of any sampling rate. ie, 44Khz - ie, audio! Yes, you can create, manipulate, process, evaluate audio, midi inputs, sensors, etc etc even in real time. You can write quite sophisticated ‘programmes’ in CHOPs. We at Realise have used it for mocap/animation editing, audio manipulation (doppler effects), controlling real time animations with light sensors/midi controllers, real time camera editing/performance capture, the list goes on…
In short, CHOPs is a amazingly powerful tool. Only one of many.
What Jordi says about programming is spot on. If your coding - then your usually (98% of the time) not doing a particular task right. So many operations can be done in SOPs, DOPs & VOPs - it's rare you need to type in code out of necessity (although it's sometimes nice to!).
Think of Houdini like ICE - but ICE everywhere in every facet of the pipeline - right up to the pixel you render. And everything speaks to everything. It's truly awesome! And I haven't even started talking about mantra/DOPs…
On a more general note, I'm very excited at the prospect of (hopefully lots) of the XSI community joining the Houdini one. I've seen some amazing work been produced by XSI - both creatively and technically. So *really* looking forward to the cross pollination. Houdini is great - but it's not a silver bullet and there's room for improvement. It's become more artist friendly in the last five years - but there's a way to go. ie, Better production ready uber shader, material mixing, modelling (maybe not the Houdini community #1 as there's other good modellers out there), graph/animation features, GUI & my personal bugbear - well designed hotkeys & workflow that enables you to “drive” Houdini like a Fighter Jet - or say - a really good game! The latter is something where there's a lot to learn from XSI, Flame & Nuke.
SESI are aware of the above - so now is a good time to be vocal and let them know what Houdini needs to be. As you will find, they are a very smart, approachable and receptive bunch.
In short - welcome all
Regards to all,
Paul Simpson