Hi guys!

I ran across a demo of a new feature in blender which is called anisculpt:
http://vimeo.com/2274969 [vimeo.com]

I thought it might interest some of you. Again wondering how this could be achieved “easily” in Houdini…

Enjoy!

Don´t know how it could be achieved easily in Houdini but how about rigging the character in Houdini and exporting it to Blender for animation and then importing it back?

If only that didn't imply to learn blender…I'm getting knee deep into houdini , that's enough for me right now…

It is very frustrating to have this thing wonderful in this application and that in another, I agree. I was doing some geometry selection last night and pulling my hair out at the lack of a simple grow/shrink facility like 3dsmax has. There's things about every app that are just done right, or at least that seem more intuitive. That little sculpting tool they put in Blender is like zbrush-lite. It leverages the zbrush interface style and everything.

As for making it work in houdini the story would be the same for as for the other apps. FileSOPs of cached/cooked geometry from animations split and run into a blend shape node and various sculpt nodes to do the edits which would then in turn be run back into the blendshape node. I'm assuming of course that there would be some way to split off a single frame from the cached geometry. I'm still a bit too much of a houdini novice to know exactly how that would be done. The nice thing would be that you wouldn't be limited to just sculpting your fixes. You could use anything in the houdini toolset to tweak your corrective shape. The bad thing is that you wouldn't have that simple little zbrush like sculpting tool. Maybe that can go on a wish list for 10. “ZBrush-LiteSOP”

Unless there is something I'm missing, currently you could probably set something up with a exhaustive bank of Edit nodes (in Sculpt mode) and a BlendShapes SOP, but you don't have any good tools to manipulate / smooth the animation of some vertices nicely. You'd have to rely on CHOPs for that right now, which is not a terribly creative process. You could probably make a nice AniScuplt Shelf Tool Set with tools for jumping about and starting new keyframes, etc.

Wouldn't it seem as if a lot of this would be possible using the Sculpt SOP along with a new Animated Edit Cache type of operation? This would be like a keyframable cache which stores vertex animations and allows some nice time-based editing to occur. Also, the BlendShapes operation only does linear interpolation and some soft characters could use some curved interpolation. Sometimes a full pose-to-pose type of blending can also look forced.

You'd probably run in to issues trying to deform multiple objects at once, too. Your character will be stuck all in an single object for this, currently.

Just my 2c
Jason

EDIT: Wait, I really thought you could do a camera-plan aligned deformation with the Sculpt tool.. You can't I see the Axis parameter only has X/Y/Z/Normal/Custom in it, nothing like “Viewing Plane”. Also, I suppose it would also have to be made to be able to drag around points rather than just performing an discrete deformation the way it does.

Thanks for the answer guys!
Yeah actually Jason, you can do camera-plan aligned deformation with edit sop in translation mode with a soft radius and aligning the manipulator handle to “view”.

The only thing missing in the sculpt tool is being able to pinch or blow and use stencil textures… Again the only alternative is to use the scale tool with soft radius to achive some kind of pinching or blowing effect.

A cool way to store the deformation would be to be able to store shape directly in the edit sop. By clicking on a button, it would pop a slider from 0 to 1 in the edit parameter tab directly. Of course you would be able to rename it and chose linear or curved interpolation..why not!!
And you would store sliders and sliders of deformation as much as you want! hehe! That would be slick!

hmmm….
the real problem here is that you can't animate with the edit SOP…

and frankly, as someone who does this kind of work a great deal in production, the utility of this kind of tool isn't as great as it seems…
at C.O.R.E. this kind of work falls into the domain of what we call Character Finaling (currently just me :shock: ), and you have to balance the amount of time this takes (often a great deal) with simply sending it back to animation for corrections and/or back to rigging for improvements that can be utilized by the animators…
while I'd love for this kind of functionality to exist in Houdini, I think I'm content with the current tool set…

Hi Arctor!
Those are good points. So you think everything is in there within Houdini to make character rigging and animation work…that's good news! I would like so much to see how a professional character animation pipeline is done within Houdini…I've worked in Maya and XSI but not houdini yet…I was actually wondering if the 3D buzz DVDs can be a good thing to look at… Also I'd like to know is Houdini's proceduralism is actually used alot within the rigging process, what kind of facial setup is used most often, if the real-time playback of houdini is comparable to the one in Maya. Do you think the auto rig character cartoon that comes with houdini is a good exemple? I found it so slow…I've been looking for free/good rigs with Houdini but it doesn't seem to actually exist on the internet…
How about the muscle system, is it something you can rely on, it seems to me it's really heavy…

Do animators at c.o.r.e like to animate in houdini in general?

ok sorry for the avalanche of questions here! I've been learning Houdini for a years now, and didn't dig real far into character rigging yet…I think actually you might already have answered to some of those questions in previous posts sorry for that too…