After reading a post from mantragora about modeling tools that is needed in Houdini, I decided to give character modeling a go to see where we need improvements.

a proper Tweak Tool with visual soft selection is a big one that I feel is needed.

Here is my WIP so far.

！！！

can you explain a little bit more one the “proper tweak” ?

pelos
can you explain a little bit more one the “proper tweak” ?

a Tweak tool allows for quick translation, rotation or scaling of a point, edge or poly/s without having to swap through the component modes. It should work with a visual soft selection as well.

Have a look at this video…from about 3:15"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTc51DiVDeA [youtube.com]

in the edit node there is a falloff radius. that will move adjacent points. doesn't display in the viewport with a nice color like in xsi.

y in the keyboard will show all the 3 components, t r and scale.

I know about the soft selection in houdini. I used it to tweak this model, but it needs to be visual in the viewport.
The biggest slow down is the amount of keys you use before you can actualy tweak points (soft selections only works on points as far as I know).

1. Press S to go to selection mode.
2. Press 2 to activate points
3. Click and select a point
4. Press t to translate then swap to y t get combination
5. Press Enter to activate selection on any other point

a proper tweak tool should be 1 button to edit points, edges or polys. Just activate soft selection before you edit and off you go…much quicker. You can see in the network view the amount of nodes it took to creat a basic head model. It broke my wrists.

Edge slide(that works with soft selections) is another tool that is missing from the tool set.

Most of the other tools are awesome and work the way they should with extra control under properties.

Very impressive work

Btw I wrote a Slide Edges tool a while ago:
https://www.orbolt.com/asset/animatrix::slideEdges::1.00 [orbolt.com]

It doesn't take soft selection/falloff into account.

How does that work in XSI? Does it only affect the selected points in the edge loop or all points within the soft selection range which mimics a surface slide rather than a single edge loop slide? If it's the former, it's pretty easy to implement.

I don't know how soft selections are implemented in XSI, but Houdini needs a separate SOP for this so you can use it purely to create soft selections, falloffs. Then add certain SOPs like Slide Edges and deformers the ability to specify a weight attribute.

Werner Ziemerink
5. Press Enter to activate selection on any other point

At this point, you're tweak using the Edit SOP right? Then you're supposed to be able to just click on another point to edit it without hitting any keys.

Thanks, pusat. The node history is long, and Softimage or Smaya would chock on that amount of history. The scene is still realtime in Houdini.

I'm going to give your edge slide a go. Thank you very much.

Sliding in Softimage with proportional on, would slide the surface radius. I've attached an animated gif.


edward,

I have to hit Enter on the edit node to be able to do that. If I don't I have to select a new point first before I can translate it. If I hit Enter, it allows me to move other points without selecting them first.

pusat
Very impressive work

Btw I wrote a Slide Edges tool a while ago:

Do I have to create a group of my selection before I ad the Slide Edges node. It does not seem to remember my selection from an edit node selection?

I made a mistake on the animated GIF. It should read “Proportional Slide OFF, or ON”

Here is a little update. Played with the new hair groom tools, to see how it works. Not sure where I want to go with this. H14 made it easier than before though.

Very cool refinements. The sharp, clean angularity of the character is striking.

Yeah, my nieces happened by here and instantly they thought the faces were “scary” and the younger one (kindergarten) decided that she didn't want to see it anymore because it was too scary.

Was this built from scratch in Houdini? if so makes me think I should give it another go too.

:-)

Thanks guys, I will show more updates once I get more comfortable with the new hair groom tools.

jordibares
Was this built from scratch in Houdini? if so makes me think I should give it another go too.

:-)

Hi Jordi,

Yes it's all Houdini. You can see the node tree in the first post. No slow down whatsoever.
Houdini 14 made it allot easier. I'm still missing a nice Tweak tool, but it is very possible to model in Houdini now. Snapping the Gizmo Handle to other parts of your geometry temporarily is great, and the “Ignore Point Connectivity” under soft selections is a massive time saver.
I do miss the visual feedback that you get from the Soft translate and Soft Peak tool. Hope they add that to the normal Edit node soft selections.
Translating your selection with middle mouse button from anywhere on screen is my favorite so far.

Nice work! Great to see someone doing some modelling in Houdini!

With regards to the tweak tool, it's not a proper tool like in xsi/modo/silo but if you put down an edit node and switch the transform handle to camera space you get a similar behaviour (although not multi-component).

The shortcut to change transform handle between world/object/camera space is ‘m’; discovered it by accident the other day, and made me happy

Modelling wise the main things I'm missing from Houdini is a tweak tool and selection mirroring; maybe 14.5. The view port update in H14, however, has made things so much better.

nothing new here…been busy learning other aspects of Houdini. Just the last render I did while diving into shading and rendering with Mantra. I'm impressed so far.

looks really good, good job

Werner Ziemerink
Werner Ziemerink

Hi Mr Werner Ziemerink.
My name is Harry Abreu and I start Houdini few weeks ago.
I'm sorry to boring you on this tread.
I'm tried to use Houdini for modeling but probably I'm doing some thing wrong after I tried to find answer I had no luck if possible can you see my question on this other forum to give me a little help?
Thank you very much.
My question [sidefx.com]

harryabreu

Werner Ziemerink
Werner Ziemerink

Hi Mr Werner Ziemerink.
My name is Harry Abreu and I start Houdini few weeks ago.
I'm sorry to boring you on this tread.
I'm tried to use Houdini for modeling but probably I'm doing some thing wrong after I tried to find answer I had no luck if possible can you see my question on this other forum to give me a little help?
Thank you very much.
My question [sidefx.com]

Hi harryabreu,

I've experienced the same issue with 15.5 when it comes to slapping down edgeloops and PolySplits. These tools has been re-written from scratch and are bound to be a bit buggy.
Your video shows this problem very well and I will submit a bug if you don't mind using the video as reference.