One thing that may be nice to make working with skinning a little easier in Houdini (and do not take me wrong, houdini does have great skinning tools!) is to allow for storage of weights in a more straighforward fashion (i.e. two dimensional array of influences vs points)
Although the index pair attribute is more memory friendly, dealing with a list of straighforward attributes is SO much easier… (plus we are able to leverage more of the rich attribute node library in houdini instead of just the capture nodes). I also feel the capture nodes in some cases act a bit “non-procedural”, making them a bit harder to integrate in procedural workflows
I even wrote a python operator (using numpy! thank you SESI
) to generate the weight attributes similar to SI and maya, process them in houdini using all the usual awesome operators, then write it back out to XML