Hi!
I was wondering what would be the best approach to a bunch of animated realistic snakes, like on the head of a medusa character. If someone could suggest a basic concept and steps of how to approach this task it would be really appreciated!

Thanks!

if you need to hand animate any of them then bones with follow curve should do it
and the wire deformer will work well for the rest…you can run them through the wire solver to prevent penetrations…

arctor: I've checked the DVD on rigging from Fahrenheit digital, an altenative from the spline IK is the Ribbon spine, have you heard of it? I was wondering if this technique is possible to do easily in Houdini.

Also, concerning the Wire snakes, what would be the best technique to actually animate the snakes randomly, is it something that can easily done with chops?

And the way I understand it, you could actually have those snakes animated and than avoid interpenetration using a wire solver on top of that. So you can have Wire deformers control a Wire solver? I did not know that…interesting!

I've heard about the ribbon spine but never really looked into it to see if it can be done in Houdini…
my guess is yes.

but depending on what these snakes are expected to do - you could get away with just wire deformers…
and yeah, CHOPs can get you some really great motion…noise etc

what you can do is
build a wire
send it through DOPs so get motion/collision etc
then back to SOPs
then into a wiredeformer
it's been improved in H9 a great deal IMO

Sounds like an interesting technical challenge. The key would be the ability to use hand-animation when necessary, but have a procedural system that did most of the work.

I'd suggest something to the effect of using particles which looked towards or hover around the subject matter, which would end up being the snake heads, and then using constraints with dops-wires (or even soft bodies) which are bound to the base head as well as the particles so the snakes won't to through one another, maybe even mid-way particles that repel etc.

From there maybe a python script to generate a simple rig for each curve / spline with keyframes to match the position data, which could be hand-animated by deleting keys etc.

CHOPs could be used to add noise effects or smoothing of the lines before heavy rig stuff.

Indeed, a good technical challenge….
Right now I have no knowledge at all of python script, I've seen a document called building tools for H9 in the learning section of this web site. Do you think I would get the knowledge I need from that doc?

Thanks for the interest guys!

hi !

I think i came pretty close to what u asked for. In fact, after animating it i actually went to find some free snake model and texture for it But, i have no idea how to access per-primitive atributes in Wire capture by creating attribute that would lower capture radius on all primitives/groups. Is it possible unless using script ? What i see now is horrid amount of parameters, each requiring its own set of attributes depending on group/primitive id. What i would like to have is same set of attributes for all primitives/groups and use per-primitive override as option. This is what prevents having high number of snakes in this scene.

k

Thanks for the post Kumpa!

It's really interesting! So, as I understand it, you'd wish to lower the wire radius so snakes could be closer together without getting bad deformation?
Unfortunetly, I don't know how to lower the radius all at once. I think this kind of thing can be done via the textport. Worst case you could do a new float parameter and just reference it by hand on all radius, it would only have to be done one time…

I hope someone gets back with a more procedural way of doing it! Anyone out there?