Hi All,

I have finally got a non-animated FBX file to transfer from Blender to Houdini, but the RIG appears to be broken.

In Blender the RIG has full IK and I can move the bones and the rest of the skeleton responds.

In Houdini, this does not happen.

Does Houdini even support IK import from FBX? (I assumed it does).

Also, is there any way to get rid of those annoying colored spheres and just work with the bones?
They block my view of the mesh, there are multiples on top of one another so I don't know which one controls what?.

the spheres are the null objects (F_Leg_down_IK_L etc) - for some reason they are being set to ‘circles’ and shaded mode. - you can just select them all and turn off their display flag- or change them to Control Type = Null and turn off shaded mode.

FBX doesn't support rigs - IK, constraints etc

you'll have to re-build all these relationships.

Thanks for the info, now I know what to expect from FBX.
Is there some script or tool floating around that will re-establish the relationships?

I am kind of “RIG challenged” and I have not dug into the way Houdini handles rigs yet.


Blender is probably a year or more away from Alembic export.

Does Collada, by chance, support IK rigs?

I don't know of anything that will transfer a full rig from one app to another…

for a simple rig like the one you're doing for the elephant I'd just start from scratch in Houdini - it wont take too long and you'll get the hang of how Houdini works…
check out the tutorials section and the docs to get started…and don't hesitate to ask any questions you might have.

Michael, which tutorials do you recommend? I see a H9 quadruped and a Mixmo tutorial under Character, but nothing really about how to do IK rigging.

ooofff….I just looked and all the ones I thought were there are gone…

for now there are some third party ones:
http://www.digitaltutors.com/software/Houdini-Rigging-tutorials [digitaltutors.com]
http://www.3dbuzz.com/training/topic/houdini?resetFilters=True [3dbuzz.com]