Trying to watch the various official houdini tutorials on an Apple TV has been quite annoying due to the lack of structure as Side Effects has so many videos, so I have put created a group under my Vimeo user so all of you transitioning can go straight to the meat and have a list of these.

Have a look and enjoy it.
https://vimeo.com/groups/houdiniofficialtutorials [vimeo.com]

Thanks Jordi.

I'm having a blast learning Houdini. How about adding a video on building reverse foot rigs to the list? Rigging tutorials are hard to find in Houdini land.

Werner

Yes they are hard to find, and often not very advanced. BTW, does anybody know if it's possible to use geometry/or points to envelope other geometry.
Like I can in Soft, I use a Nurbs surface, envelope that to the character mesh and use the deformation on the nurbs object to drive the deformation on the character mesh. Can this be done in Houdini, or am I limited to capture regions and metaballs? I would love to hear from the houdini rigging masters ;-)

You can find that tutorial on 3DBuzz and from what I recall its free. Search on old tutorials (old interface) and surely you will find it and it is still very much relevant.

Werner Ziemerink
Thanks Jordi.

I'm having a blast learning Houdini. How about adding a video on building reverse foot rigs to the list? Rigging tutorials are hard to find in Houdini land.

Werner

Andy58
Yes they are hard to find, and often not very advanced. BTW, does anybody know if it's possible to use geometry/or points to envelope other geometry.
Like I can in Soft, I use a Nurbs surface, envelope that to the character mesh and use the deformation on the nurbs object to drive the deformation on the character mesh. Can this be done in Houdini, or am I limited to capture regions and metaballs? I would love to hear from the houdini rigging masters ;-)

Think of metaballs as nulls with influence and additive/substractive properties, not in the traditional modelling sense.

Have a look at this for interesting uses of the existing toolset

http://www.orbolt.com/asset/animatrix::bone::1.00 [orbolt.com]
http://www.orbolt.com/asset/houdini_tools::PGMVC_capt_deform [orbolt.com]

(this last one is extremely powerful so keep an eye on it)

hope it helps
jb

Andy58
Like I can in Soft, I use a Nurbs surface, envelope that to the character mesh and use the deformation on the nurbs object to drive the deformation on the character mesh.

It's a bit of a misnomer but the WireCapture/WireDeform SOPs supports NURBs surfaces (in addition to curves). Well, at least it did when I last tried it.

jordibares
You can find that tutorial on 3DBuzz and from what I recall its free. Search on old tutorials (old interface) and surely you will find it and it is still very much relevant.

Thanks, but the 3DBuzz rigging stuff is not for free. Not a problem though. I managed to learn allot from just playing around with the bone and capturing tools in Houdini…and reading the help files.
I'm finding it very clean and easy to rig in Houdini. The reverse foot rig took me a couple of minutes to figure out, and I found a couple of hidden gems that Softimage does not have.
I'm loving Houdini more and more every day.