Hi!
Here's my first attemp at doing a rigged character in Houdini.
It's a character inspired from those balls with legs from www.animationmentor.com.

It's really simple stuff, but I guess it can be fun to play around with it for people who want to work on there animations and Houdini skills.

Right now it's a v001, so it's far from perfect. I'd like to turn this guy into a digital asset first, when I figure how to do so. Also I'd like to add a squash and stretch functionality to it.

Please if you have any suggestion, comments or questions about it, I would really appreciate to get your feedbacks, especially if you are a Houdini character td I'd really like to know what could have been done better!

thanks alot people! I hope you'll enjoy it!

Hey, thanks. I'm going to give them a wirl, particularly the one-legged guy.
I've been working on a one-leg character for teaching animation. I regard one leg as a better place to start new people in character work. Primarily because you can't avoid weight-shift and overlap with one leg.

Nice! … and thanks.

We wait for v002.

Wonderful! Thanks so much!

BTW, the ‘1leg’ file has the two legged version, while the ‘2leg’ file has both of them as posed for the image.

Oh shiiii…Shoup! ops:
Thanks for tellling me! Sorry for that, I uploaded the think quickly this morning. As soon as I get back home, I'll post the 2 invidiual characters with clean poses…

Cheers!

No worries. Can't wait to play with them when they have toe controls.

Ok, I just updated the file to download in the original post, everything should work fine now…If there are any problems let me know please!

goldleaf: what do you mean?

Can't wait to play with them when they have toe controls.

It as toe Controls…doesn't it?


Cheers!

I haven't had a chance to download the updated files, but here is an image showing what I meant by toe control. Having an avar to pivot the toe area of the foot.

Thanks for doing this, btw.

Hi Goldleaf!
It didn't change from the old version to the new, it is in there since day 1
It's all in the Ankle_Ctrl, take a look at the picture attached….
Not only it can do what you ask for, but when you play with the foot roll slider it already gives you a foot rotation in X from the heel to the toes.
The foot roll attributes tab sliders, give you extra controls to play with the footroll rotation angles.
You also have the foot sideroll slider to rock your foot from one side to the other with the good pivot on each side…
the rest of the setup is really standard stuff…

You should download the new version and give it a test drive for a couple of hours, I also added the needed channel groups for animation in the channel list.

I hope this helps, and hope that this actually works for you!

Thanks alot for the comments!

Ah, I see. Thanks!

can we have a three and four legged version too?

I may have found a bug in the rig. When I translate the whole rig 2.94 or more in the Z axis, the knee flips backwards.

Fun character JRGauthier . I have a sort of general question about rigs. I’ve seen it a couple of times in Maya and in your ball character that people create animation handles that have unlimited translate range, meaning that I can move the character controls very far away from the actual object being animated. I’m not working as an animator per se so I don’t know but wouldn’t it be more intuitive to have control limits in a range relative to the characters “volume” so to speak?

meaning that I can move the character controls very far away from the actual object being animated

I'm not sure to understand what you mean…are you talking about the foot control that should have a limited range around the body.


The thing is about limits, is that it might sound like a good idea, but to me it's kind of useless a bit when you think twice…

Usually, having limits only limits you…that was easy

In the exemple of a foot handle, even if you don't have limits, why would you go put your foot far away from your body? I don't need limits to tell me to not do it, it's just common sense.

On the other side, if at some point I need to put it far away for some obscur reason(wich sometimes happen in 3d) I'll be stock with those limits…

I actually say that, but you know, I do put limits sometimes, but not relative to the character “volume”. I lock all the animation parameters that won't need to be used, this is really useful when you don't want keyframes putted by mistakes on those certains parameters…That kind of limit is much more useful. To restrict acces to some parameters.

Does that awnser your question Soulvector?

thanks!

Yes that was a good answer JRGauthier. Perhaps this is a completely different discussion and I really like your character don’t get me wrong there But my first thought when I opened up your MrBall scene was that it would be nice if the controls stayed in place so I could move the legs around fast without thinking if they would turn up in a unpredictable position far away from the foot. The reason to why I was asking is because sometimes when moving objects around in the viewport they have a tendency to go away. I am mainly a modeler but I also setup character, in Maya that is (Doing character setups is something fairly new to me but I’ve done modeling for a few years and to be honest I have very little experience from animation so I´m still learning).But when doing modeling I enjoy for instance having automatically locked vertices on 0 in X-axis (construction plane in Houdini)because it makes it easy to create a mirror and always having the vertices on place no matter how fast I work and I can be really loose and work fast and intuitive. And it is in those lines I´m thinking that the foot follows the control but the control itself never offsets too far away so one can just be less careful so to speak.

cheers