Very rarely you will have to program things in boudini… that is number one thing… it is very well designed. Rough on some end user areas but the core is rock solid which is the reason I feel now happy about it.
Regarding your question my preferred path is
- Get your mocap in BVH format as the mcbiovision conversion command is very good, unlike the FBX import which is a bit weird and I personally don't like the setup (although I am using it at the moment)
- Once you have the skeleton moving add a CHOPs network (channel operations) to get the data from the bones and trim it, loop it, soften it, add variations with sprints, echoes and whatever you want. blend it, stitch it, sequence it and basically output after all that a BCLIP.
- Then, once you have a library of BCLIPs (like xxi animation clips) get your real skeleton that drives your mesh (with or without shadow skeleton, depending on how much you want to touch it later) and load that data.
Now the fun part starts.
- Get your character and convert it to a digital asset, add some menus to select the clip you want, then you can add some tools to operate the animation (like randomisation of curves, offsets, etc…) and presto.
Now you have a character that not only has animation but is fully aware of what is what.
I am right now using this with a not optimised skeleton and I have more than 30 clips that I am selecting in less than a minute, randomised and processed per character.
i have been able to put 170 characters in my scene without hiccups although I am starting to big memory limits (my laptop is 16Gb and as I said, it is not very optimised character)
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.
And this is one my current plans, I am preparing to document all these things for SideFX to have a look (with videos) so hopefully they will see what Softimage artists really are after, sometimes it is destructive manipulations what we need.
hope it helps
Constantin X
Hello SideFX,
And thank you Jordi for your help. I have a very specific question, not a general one. I work a lot with MOCAP(i generate the files with my own system). I bring the clips inside XSI, apply them to my model and then i clean the curves as needed. I rely heavily on 3 tools: simplify curves command, smooth curves command and animation layers. For animation layers i think there is the blend node inside chops(there is othe way?) But for the life of me i can't find simplify curves and smooth curves. At list there is something like this, or equivalent inside Houdini? I don't want the program to automatically smooth the curves(using mcbiovision) because i don't want to apply it for certain moves(knee bone curves for example). So i need to manually clean the curves myself inside Houdini. And one more thing: can the good folks at SideFX include something like 'match translation/transfromations inside Houdini? And also apply this to pivot? Thanks in advance for the help.
Thank you,
Constantin