I have an obj from LightWave imported into Houdini for facial animation. I was following along with the video tutorial on facial animation but I can't get any blend animation going. I have gone over the tutorial a couple of times to make sure I haven't missed anything. Is there some kind of conversion for obj to have point manipulation in Houdini? Did I miss something when I imported the file into Houdini?

Thanks

What kind of results are you getting? Does the imported geometry look ok? For fun, you can append a Facet SOP to your File SOP and set Orient Polygons. Are your blend shapes all done in Lightwave or are you simply importing a base shape and then creating the others via Edit SOPs?

The file looks great. The only this I can't do is get the blend shape to work. I made sure to create an edit op and edit the points but I get no animation when I create a slider. Is the facet sop just a matter of connecting that to the base head. Oh, the base has not morphs on it. Sorry I am a newbie to this.

i haven't seen the blend shapes tut yet, so i don't know what path it's taking you, but just try this and you will see how the blend works..

file sop
|
|_____edit sop
| |
| _____ |
| |
blend sop


where the file is your imported obj, the edit is your changes to that model, and your blend sop will allow you to morph between them. the blend sop will have 16 params.. those are your 16 inputs allowed in to the blend sop. so change the 2nd param from 0-1 back and forth.

it's also good to note that the blend sop will only append data sets from additional inputs on to the first input rather than actually change the data sets from one input to the next like the sequence blend sop does.. i learned that a while back on here and was a good thing to know when working on things..

hth,
dave

ahh, stupid ascii art not working out.. anyways, you should get the idea…

I haven't created any data sets and that may be what my problem is.

Thanks for the suggestion. I will try it and see what happens. Would you happen to know if there are any printed materail on Houdini. I have a couple of pdfs but thought I would ask.

Thanks again