I was following the “rigging series - 01 HDA & spine” ( https://vimeo.com/222707484 [vimeo.com] ). In the beginning of this tutorial Michael Goldfarb draws a spine bone in the side view and changes the drawing setting from “view based” to “freehand” because otherwise the bones would be drawn on top of the geometry he tells us.

But when I draw bones in “freehand” mode in the “right” view and try to draw them along the Y-axis, the bones are always drawn flat in the Z-axis. As if I'm drawing from the Top view, no matter what viewport I use.

So that seems useless, unless you want to adjust the scale and rotation of all the bones afterwards.

The only way I can draw bones where I want them is to use “view based”, and strangely enough, the bones seem to be drawn nicely in the middle ( so in this case flat in the X-axis ), and not on top of the geometry.

Am I doing something wrong, or is “freehand” bone drawing broken in 17.5 ?

Thanks,

R

…also; is it normal behaviour that “capture geometry” only works when selecting the parent of the bone chain in the viewport ? When I select the root node in the “network view” and hit enter, nothing happens.

I tried this several times now, created a new scene, restarted Houdini, and the only way to “capture geometry” seems to select the root in the viewport.

But in several tutorials I see the root being picked in the network view.

Is this a bug ?

Schizophrenia seems to be a SideFX of Houdini :-)

I toggled some viewport related setting I changed in the preferences before, and it looks like the drawing of the bones suddenly works as expected.
Though “View Based” does seem to select a polygon when drawing a bone on top of some geometry, but it does not draw the bone on top of the geo. I don't know if that's correct ?

Capture geo still only works when the root is selected in the viewport or Tree view.

Don't know what setting fixed it, because when I change everything back to the way it was it's still fixed. Seems like simply toggling or looking at the preferences was doing the trick ?

I'm new to Houdini so probably I'm doing a lot of stuff wrong, or not the way they were intended. But I get a lot of this strange behaviour, where things don't seem to work or I get errors. And after saving and restarting or reloading a scene, or jumping out, and back into a node, suddenly makes it work.

Is this just me, or part of the Houdini workflow ?

Thanks,

R

what version of Houdini are you using?
what operating system?
what graphics card?

the issues you're having sound weird

Yes, tell me about it. They’ve been sounding weird to me for a while as well now.

I’m trying to switch from Soft to Houdini, but so far I’m running into bugs and hurdles with a lot of features. To be honest, when I think that this is what I’d have to deal with every day, suddenly Maya doesn’t look so bad anymore.

I used 17.5.258, then support advised me to try .293 with no difference on the issues I encountered. Even though some - as I understood - should have been fixed in .293.
Strangely enough one issue regarding editing captured weights that was suddenly gone in .258, re-appeared after I had to re-install it because Redshift doesn’t work with .293 yet.

I’m working with win 7 on a Geforce GTX 1070.

toonafish
But when I draw bones in “freehand” mode in the “right” view and try to draw them along the Y-axis, the bones are always drawn flat in the Z-axis. As if I'm drawing from the Top view, no matter what viewport I use.

This will happen when the construction plane is turned on.

You're not going to get your hands on a 3d package as intuitive and straight forward as Softimage is (only current/former Soft users will understand) anytime soon, so you might just as well embrace the benefits Houdini provides you with fir the time being. Of course, it's up to you to weigh those benefits vs the downsides.