Hi,

Wanted to create some clusters using soft selections as the falloff is great. Tried to parent the transform info from the edit sop to a null so I had a visual controller. It works in the viewport and moves the soft selection but you cant keyframe this for use with animation as the edit SOP cant be animated or time dependant.

With the new tools coming in 16.5 for soft selection I thought it would be powerful to use for facial animation creating clusters.

How can this type of thing be done? Bones and Capture regions are so clunky to use, I just want to be able to select points, change the influence then translate these and keyframe.

Anybody have any insights into this?

I really want to use Houdini for rigging and anmation but I find I keep hitting problems…

Wish there were some up to date rigging and facial tutorials that were not auto rigging. Anybody making these please shout out so I know there might be help somewhere down the line.

Many Thanks,

Duncan

Hey Duncan,
have you tried using the soft transform sop. it might do want you want.
Cheers
Philipp

Hey guys,

This one is a little bit of a pickle… The soft transform SOP gets really close, and for broad stuff where no manual control of weights is required, it works fine. The hitch is with creating a handle for the animator to work with. Promoting the handle to the rig hda does not currently play very nicely (the pivot ain't where it should be!)… And of course we need the handle to follow any previous deformations applied to the mesh.

In order to work round this, the best I've managed to come up with for this kind of setup is
- creating a point constrained null that uses the same point and up vector as the soft transform SOP
- making sure the soft transform SOP is using ‘Local Transform’
- setting the correct axes on the point constraint (lookat -Z, up +Y)
- **make sure the point constraint is referencing the node upstream of the target soft transform to avoid double transforms**
- parent another null to the previous one; this is our handle
- now that we have a null in the same ‘space’ as the soft transform we can just channel reference the parms back to the soft transform SOP.

I've included my advanced torus rig as a quick demo Hope you find it useful. Oh, and if anyone out there has found a better way, please let me know!

Cheers,
Henry

Wish there was a simple way to do this. Suppose you could create your own tools that creates a falloff radius and then apply that to the transform but not sure exactly how you would work that out.

I created some geo objects and added a control sop inside so i could snap to the mesh. Nice to have a visual icon and then clean transforms for animation. I linked the soft transform to that position. I will only be moving not rotating the points about so this worked out ok.

Any pitfalls or issues using this method you can see?