Michael Battcock
Very excited about the rigging masterclass, when do you think that will be available?

Hopefully within a week. It's all recorded, just going through editing now.

We are also working on a few advanced videos on muscles, which should be out in a few weeks.

Lots more to come. Please stay tuned.

Cristin

just my 2 cents here. The rigging tools in Houdini is amazing. We've been using them for a while now (not the auto rigger) and are happy in general. For us, setting up rig Hda's (workflow) is something that can greatly improve. I've submitted RFE's and I'm sure SideFX is listening.

Great job guys, and can't wait for the Masterclass.

Werner Ziemerink
just my 2 cents here. The rigging tools in Houdini is amazing. We've been using them for a while now (not the auto rigger) and are happy in general. For us, setting up rig Hda's (workflow) is something that can greatly improve. I've submitted RFE's and I'm sure SideFX is listening.

Great job guys, and can't wait for the Masterclass.

Thank you, Werner.

What would you like to see in a masterclass about general rigging in Houdini (not auto-rigging)?

Cristin

If you don't mind me answering your question too, I'd say - a bit of facial rigging, techniques aimed at both cartoon as well as realistic, if time permits.

There are so many ways to skin a cat. Every studio like to do it their own way.

To us, any information regarding digital assets would be welcome, and would show it's strengths and weaknesses.

We don't get lots of time setting up portable Hda's during production and building interfaces for animators takes way too long…maybe we are doing it wrong.

I've suggested portable bundles(among others) to make picking of selections easier when it comes to setting up these interfaces. Imagine having overlapping groups that riggers can generate once and then use later to set up the front end…for example hand controls can be part of multiple groups/bundles but also be part of upper body bundles.

We know this is possible with python, but would be great as a user friendly workflow.

Another one would be picking in the character picker.

Copy paste from RFE 80397

“Right now it takes a lot of effort to set up buttons for the character picker because one has to scroll through the whole list of nodes. This also depends on careful naming conventions and much back and forth as the rig grows.

We propose adding 2 buttons as seen in the attached gif to make setup quicker and easier. The ability to pick nodes from the viewport and to add nodes to the existing set. This requires only minor changes to the controlbutton.py as seen, and does not seem to clash with any existing functionality. One oddity while clicking the addSelected button is the need to hold shift to stop the natural deselection which occurs within the character picker.

We understand that major changes are being made on character setup functionality, but this small change to the existing system would make our riggers lives easier in the mean time.”

The masterclass for the Auto Rig released last week was very useful but I found it was not as in depth as i've come to expect from the other masterclasses - to be fair it was presented as an ‘Overview’ which I think is more accurate.

I was hoping for more about building rigs from scratch - maybe not a full character rig if that would take too long but the core concepts of rigging in Houdini and how it relates/differs to other packages.
I'd also be interested in some tutorials on muscles, pose space deformations, simulating skin and facial rigging

Obviously this is a huge topic and would take a long time to cover all of theses but I would really like to see some more advanced in-depth rigging tutorials.

Thanks for all the great work!

Michael Battcock
it was not as in depth as i've come to expect from the other masterclasses

I agree that Masterclass is perhaps not the right name
More of a detailed overview like you said, but VERY useful, so I'm really glad they made one like this.

I would however also love a more detailed and general video about advanced rigging in houdini!

Moin,

> I would however also love a more detailed and general video about advanced rigging in houdini!

I am very interested in statements like this, since I believe that there are more ways to skin a cat (or to rig a hat) than Houdini has nodes - what would you consider “advanced rigging”?

As an example: I keep seeing “I want a tutorial on facial rigging in Houdini” popping up every other day, yet, in my world “facial rigging” as such is completely independent from Houdini and very much depending on the needs of your studio/animation/project/whatever. The TECH is there, in Houdini, but this tech is not tailored towards “facial rigging” in any way, it can be applied to “goo rigging” just as well.

I am still working on an (ongoing) course on rigging and animation in Houdini and I am collecting expectations from various sources. To me, “rigging” as such is a basic understanding of how you make the action of one “thing” (item, node, parameter, constraint) dependant on another “thing” (dito). Parenting two items is “rigging”, constraining your coffee machine to your dog's sleeping rhythm is “rigging”, it only gets “advanced” if you expect complex operations to be done within a single connection (dog snores = coffee done including whipped cream and a cookie). Therefor, to me, “advanced” rigging is more along the lines of “I have a HIGHLY specific usecase that is in NO way applicable to any other situation and need a maximum-comfort-solution for this”. Which does not sound like a good topic for a tutorial - to me.

Hopefully this makes some sense, I am very open to any input!

Marc

Another thing that pops up everywhere on the forum, as well as in our studio, is CHOPS.

a Masterclass on how to set up and manipulate bones in CHOPS would be amazing.
The power of CHOPS seems to be the one area that everybody talks about, but never uses.

The semantics and definition of ‘advanced rigging’ is one thing but the wishlist for me would be:

character rigging from scratch
muscles
facial rigging
simulating skin

And I agree, in theory, this is application independent and of course there are ‘many ways to skin a cat’ but I would like to know the best method to do this in Houdini, recommended by sideFX (as is the format in the other masterclasses)

Hmm,

Generally I like videos that make me understand workflows and how to approach problems better than videos that just show me the steps to do one specific trick - Videos that are as app-agnostic as possible, i.e. focused on the theory of things, while at the same time showing how to solve the problem in the app of choice.

An advanced video on rigging in Houdini should go into how one thinks about rigging in houdini, what seperates it from other apps, what its strengths and weaknesses are. To show how this would then be applied in practice it might use several example cases, and talk about how one should think about solving them, before taking us through building a specific rig to do so.
By building several rigs from scrath, and talking about why one does what one does, it will hopefully give people what they need to continue exploring and build even more complex setups for themselves.

Does that make sense? Maybe I'm just ramblin'

these are all good suggestions, so thanks and keep them coming.
Something that makes this whole thing tricky is what ‘basic’ and ‘advanced’ mean when it comes to rigging in Houdini. There is a great deal of interest in ‘advanced’ rigging, but then at the same time there are many users who've never done any rigging but want to start. Both of these cases should be accommodated.
Also when people talk about facial rigging - what do they mean? A simple bone/blendshape rig on a toon style character, an Uncharted 4 game character, Benjamin Button?
This is a high priority for us (me) so please keep providing feedback.

For me these masterclasses should be (and generally all have been) catered for people with a good understanding of Houdini and decent knowledge of the topic, so not necessarily so much for people who've never done any rigging (I think that should be for another/separate video tutorial).

I have found the following (Maya) rigging tutorials to be very good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MV4XRgmTynY&list=PL8hZ6hQCGHMXKqaX9Og4Ow52jsU_Y5veH&index=1 [youtube.com]
https://www.3dtotal.com/tutorial/1888-maya-rigging-final-by-jahirul-amin-animation [3dtotal.com]

As there is some good theory as well as showing how to actually build the rig.

It would be great to see (I guess this would be considered standard or basic rigging):

- FK/IK blend
- Reverse foot control
- No flip pole vectors

I would consider the following more ‘advanced’ (and probably more interesting to me):

- muscle simulation
- skin simulation (e.g. https://vimeo.com/album/2978126/video/141382975) [vimeo.com]
- pose space deformation (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuiB1Rv75O8) [youtube.com]
- facial rigging
- personally I would like to see photoreal facial rigging, e.g.:
https://vimeo.com/album/2978126/video/96875900 [vimeo.com]
https://vimeo.com/album/2978126/video/134663979 [vimeo.com]


Thanks!

Michael Battcock
skin simulation (e.g. https://vimeo.com/album/2978126/video/141382975) [vimeo.com]

Hi Michael,

This link does not work.

Sorry, here you go:

https://vimeo.com/141382975 [vimeo.com]

Just wondering if there are any other videos on the horizon?
Getting greedy now but if I could add another tutorial request it would be a masterclass on chops. I don't use chops often but it would be great to see what potential use cases they could have (especially for rigging) as I know they are a really powerful tool.
These are also good videos if anyone else is interested:

https://vimeo.com/209784546 [vimeo.com]
https://vimeo.com/212387747 [vimeo.com]

Any updates as to when we can expect those RIGGING MASTERCLASSES SESI?

Well I just started with Houdini and I can say that a few Immediate issues popped up. I brought in a character that was done in Centimeters not Meters and of course it was Huge compared to the Auto-Rig. So then I looked up changing the .Hip Setting for default size. This failed and my character still came in Huge compared to the Auto-rig. There was no way to scale the Auto-rig. And I wanted my character to maintain it's size. So that was a Dead End.

So I thought I would test Houdini's older tools for this. They seemed to have been removed from the shelves. So that was a Dead End.

And I am reading on this thread that there are issue with Compatibility with an FBX Import/Export Pipeline. Nothing is More Important then that Pipeline. In this industry everything is touched by multiple programs. Until then this is just a Fun Toy and not a Tool…

EddieChristian
I brought in a character that was done in Centimeters not Meters and of course it was Huge compared to the Auto-Rig.

You can set the scene units to centimetres under Edit > Preferences > Hip File Options > Unit Length and selecting using the drop-down menu. Hopefully that helps a bit.

EddieChristian
Well I just started with Houdini and I can say that a few Immediate issues popped up. I brought in a character that was done in Centimeters not Meters and of course it was Huge compared to the Auto-Rig. So then I looked up changing the .Hip Setting for default size. This failed and my character still came in Huge compared to the Auto-rig. There was no way to scale the Auto-rig. And I wanted my character to maintain it's size. So that was a Dead End.

What am I missing here: why not just scale the character down by 0.01, do-work, then rescale up by 100 for export.

Thought those .hip unit preferences are only meant to work with DOPs.