Hi there!

I'm currently looking at the Houdini Cat Rigging Series, the Rigging Series (SideFx) and the Rigging Seminar (Delano Athias).

What I haven't seen so far: A way or THE way to alter the finished rigs in case the geo changes or the quad mesh needs to be fit into a dog with different proportions.

With all the dependencies in the rig, parented stuff, etc. this looks like a nightmare, doesn't it? Or is it actually quite simple and I miss something? Would be rather foolish to rebuild the stuff everytime you need it…

Wished each series would come with an additional video covering this subject.

I imagine a simple wire/curve skeleton would be great as the base for a rig to alter and the bone rig just adapts to it as soon as one is comfortable with the new rig dimensions. Guess one needs a script? Or what is the way to do it.

Riggers spend all day long with this subject, don't they?



Cheers
Tom

it's usually easier to just redo the work than to create some system of scripts etc to allow this kind of adjustment to be ‘automatic’

Mmmh. First thanks for the quick answer, but this rather is disappointing to hear since all about Houdini seems to be around non-destructive workflows.

Just for clarification. While this isn't finished, it's close to the current needs. I create a “shadow” rig which resembles the final bone structure. I'm going to create this rig one by one afterwards, but if I need to change it's proportions, I want to alter the shadow rig and have some clever mumbo-jumbo apply this to the existing bone rig. Each “bone” does calculate it's restlength, position and orientation. it also carries it's name which is identical to the real bones name. This applies for the nulls/roots
, too.

Does some script already exists which could be altered or is this new territory?

Cheers!

“…some clever mumbo-jumbo…”
this is where things start to not be worth the time/effort
there may be custom scripts out there to help with this kind of thing - though I've never seen one - and even if you find one it will be tied to the specific rig it was built for…

this is where things like the Autorigs come into play - instead of adjusting an already built rig you adjust a set of guide objects to the new/altered geometry and then the Autorigs build your rig all over again.

Sure, there's not THE one rig and not THE script for all rigs. But I imagine it to be pretty simple. For each real bone there's a shadow bone.

I only alter the shadow bones when I change the rig. Then the script I'm talking about goes through all selected bones. Each bone looks for a 2-point primitive with the same name. Then the bone takes this primitives position, rotation and restlength attribute and applies these to itself. Rig updated. Or?

I don't need a script which realizes that it needs to add additional bones or delete them. Just a basic one which updates the translations and proportions.

you could build a shadow rig and constrain the real rig to it
with a script that took the values from the constrained position/orientation and baked it into the real bones and turned off the constraint

but this would just work for the bones and some simple controls, more complex rig stuff would need more effort

Thanks, Michael! I will look into Python next week and check whether this is going to work for me. Hope this doesn't turn out to be too complicated. As long as I can update all the Ik solvers on the fly too, I should be fine.

Cheers!