Hi guys and Happy Thanksgiving.

Does anyone know if SideFX has any plans to have an animation clip editor like Softimage or Maya where you can organize, reuse and blend animations easily? Otherwise I'm just going to write one because I think that's one of the missing things that will put Houdini over-the-top in the animation department.

Thanks,
Caesar

Chops is far superior to Mixer and Trax for this sort of thing….

yep chops, very powerful & flexible, even without chop-vops…

I think Caesar is referring to the user friendly interface and robustness of nonlinear editing system for animation clips
calling CHOPs far superior is a stretch as CHOPs are very powerful, however quite technical and manual to tweak

Animation Mixer in XSI could even have Clips that store constraints, making it very powerful to manage complex relationships just by mixing clips in a very fast, visual and nonlinear way

no doubt you can technically do all that in CHOPs, but it's far more involved to do any kind of changes including retiming, offsetting, rrearranging, layering, blending clips
on top of that clips in CHOPs store just keyframes and expressions, so to embedd constraint relationships within them is additional manual setup that's required

Layers in CHOPs are fairily limited too, they don't support absolute layers, all is additive, so to achieve that, additional custom setup required
on top of that all channels that are in mixed layers have to exist in base layer too, which is very limiting and doesn't allow just mixing anything you want