Greetings, I'm a new houdini user and can't stop digging into it, it's totally amazing . I've been in the 3d industry for almost 10 years now using mainly maya, and houdini impresses me everytime I use it.
I did not have time yet to jump into rigging, auto-rig and character animation, which I really enjoy. Houdini seems to have all the right tools to do it, but how about the speed? I've been playing a bit with those quadruped rigging scenes, and even with only proxy geometry, it seems a bit slow…ok, probably I'll need to watch all those videos to get my awnsers but I can't wait I'd like to know from y'all experiences:
Is houdini fast for character animation? With Auto-rig or custom production rigs. Is it possible to get a real-time feedback of the animation if you only work with real lores proxy? I'm guessing(at least hoping) the awnser is “yes” since everything is so flexible in houdini… But If you people outthere could share your experiences that would be really appreciated!
When you use the auto rig tools, you get two rigs to work with. First there is an animation rig which has parented in proxy geometry and then there is a deformation rig that plugs into the animation rig.
Even with relatively high rez geometry, the proxy rig runs smoothly and can be run in real time. You can get this rig set up in your first hour and begin blocking out motion.
The deform rig is then used to capture the geometry to a simple muscle system (instead of bones although you could use bones if you wanted) and when it is ready it will be plugged into the animation rig. If you capture high rez geometry then it will be slower but in all cases you will get interactive feedback. For real time you can then flipbook or turn off the display flag on the deform rig and work with the proxy rig.
Robert Magee Senior Product Marketing Manager SideFX
but there are some(many) things that have to be taken into account and it takes some smart optimization (more so than Maya for eg) to really get a rig up to speed…
also, and this is something I don't have the technical chops to explain/understand fully, there seems to be a real difference in the way Houdini and Maya render to the viewport…
some of the slowness you are experiencing could be from the version you are using. there have been a lot of improvements in H9 so you might want to upgrade .. if you have the latest, then you could try to do a few things to help with performance. the default is on for the update of all the gadgets in the UI so that is good so your viewport is optimized, the wireframes of the geometry could be converted to tri-strip geometry, which is faster to draw for the viewport.
there is more as well, but you machine as a part in this as well. -k
thekenny: I'm actually using h9 apprentice. I'm not familiar with tri-strips polygones yet…is it simply converting quads to tris? Concerning my machine, it's not a war machine but I could always play my proxy animation real-time in Maya, so I don't see why I could not do it in Houdini. Of course it depends on the complexity of the rig, but for what I've seen of the quadruped rig, except from the muscle, it doesn't looks like crazy power hunger rig. Actually do I need to specify to turn off muscles, or as long as I move the animation rig and the muscle are hidden, it's not calculated?
There's a tristrip sop, just slap that down and wire your geometry into it.
As long as you use the proxy rig and the muscles are off they won't cook and slow things down.
I think in generally houdini will always be slightly slower because of its totally procedural nature. Its the price you pay for total flexibility. Generally the slightly slower speed is more than made up for by the efficiency.
The trick is finding just the right hammer for every screw
I wouldnt call Houdini CA as slightly slower. Its pretty much slowest I expirienced in the market.
For example I can fire up Blender, input 300k poly object, draw some bones and do a weightmap from boneheat (new weight assigement algo) use Auto IK and be animating in 10 minutes. Compare that with the Quadruped Tutorial series…
Same thing in XSI…
The 300k poly object remark is targeted in how Houdini struggles with 20k or so poly object in Quadruped Tutorial
General feeling of slowness coupled with no viewport subdivision display are major things keeping me from investing in Houdini Escape for starters.
Houdini seems to have problems breaking free from the effects only tool, even with 9.
this might seem obvious to a few but thought I'd throw it in, my personal experience / learning curve etc …
One of the major reasons my geometry scenes were “slow” for real time cooking at first was because I was incorrectly referencing static geometry vs animated geometry.
If you have a type of SOP that is updated every frame, and merge this data (with merge SOP) or reference with point expression etc it will need to cook the animated geometry, and therefore recook the whole thing once it's referenced, regardless of it the end result is animated or not.
It's much faster to have the “static” geometry in different geometry objects, or even in the same geo but referenced with object merge and different visibility so it only has to cook once.
Could even be as simple as referencing a point color of an animated mesh etc.
Maybe there is a part of the character setup that is referenced and visible somehow? Houdini is quite fast I think as long as the stuff is not being merged each frame or something, but H defiantly gives the user enough rope to hang yourself with and then call it slow. With dynamics / muscles I'd played realtime on a not-so-good machine that would easily crash max
el_diablo I wouldnt call Houdini CA as slightly slower. Its pretty much slowest I expirienced in the market.
For example I can fire up Blender, input 300k poly object, draw some bones and do a weightmap from boneheat (new weight assigement algo) use Auto IK and be animating in 10 minutes. Compare that with the Quadruped Tutorial series…
he, he, :twisted: the first thing I find when I google bone heat is a post seemingly from your good self explaining an issue with boneheat not working…
ummm… you guys know there is a capture type called ‘proximity’ right? the exact same type is used in the Baran & Popović paper…which seems to be what this crazy BoneHeat thingy is doing…
check it out.
personally I find that I get best results with regions and GROUPS*, you'll almost always have to paint and this method reduces that to the minimum.
* making groups on the capture geometry and then using these groups in multiple capture SOPs
I agree with arctor that looks a lot like proximty weighting. That's been in Houdini for years and its fine for simple very soft and bendy deformation but you always end up painting weights to get the best results. I think in calin tuts he's basically decided that since you can paint the weights in about 30 minutes anyway why bother with any auto stuff.
@arctor are you sure the houdini proximity capture is the same as that paper? or is there a new proximity capture that they have added?
Also that quaternion blending stuff at the bottom of the page with bone heat looks rather like what I was doing with my flex stuff, and from what I can guess at it must be something very similar to what houdni muscles now offer. Only with muscles you can add in a lot more control than what you'll get from just enveloping the bones themselves which seems to be all you are getting in blender.
The trick is finding just the right hammer for every screw
yeah, i don't think houdini does any of the penalty biasing stuff, its just a straight forward distance weighting. So fingers next to each other will get captured by each others bones and not work. The idea of this other formulation is to avoid all those issues. However having downloaded the test app it gives a very soft result everywhere so I doubt that it would be suitable in all situations.
The trick is finding just the right hammer for every screw
el_diablo For example I can fire up Blender, input 300k poly object, draw some bones and do a weightmap from boneheat (new weight assigement algo) use Auto IK and be animating in 10 minutes. Compare that with the Quadruped Tutorial series…
As other alreay pointed, this is available in Houdini for a long time. I really doubt that the result Blender gives you with the boneheat would be production ready without any touch up. I also doubt Blender's toolset is as complete and production ready as the auto rig / body parts toolset.
Same thing in XSI…
Not true, in my experience. I actually find Houdini's weighting tools superior to XSI's, same for the Autorig toolset. But XSI does handle lots of geometry much better than Houdini.
The 300k poly object remark is targeted in how Houdini struggles with 20k or so poly object in Quadruped Tutorial
I wouldn't qualify it as “struggling” but Houdini's viewport speed is probably the slowest of any package, which is very disappointing. I was expecting so much more from H9 in this area.
General feeling of slowness coupled with no viewport subdivision display are major things keeping me from investing in Houdini Escape for starters.
I'd like to know from y'all experiences:
