I have a Character mesh. i create a skeleton, connect it to 'Rig Stash Pose'. i weight paint using 'joint capture biharmonic'. i tweak each joint weights precisely using 'capture layer paint'. then, i temporarily setup kinefx (connect everything to 'bonedeform' and 'rig pose' nodes). Then i create a 5 frame Animation (like a finger curl). then i delete 'bonedeform' and 'rig pose' nodes. then I copy each frame's pose into a new 'rig pose' node. Now i basically have a 5 frame Animation SEQUENCE, but each pose is stored in a 'rig pose' node. Then Each rig pose node is connected to its corresponding 'name' node. then each name node is connected to 'pack' node.

Now i connect everything to 'pack folder'.

In the attributes of 'pack folder':
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The Character is setup as '.shp'; the main skeleton is setup as '.skel'. All Additional 'pack' nodes are setup as '.skel' as well.

Then i initialize apex by adding an 'apex auto rig component', in attributes, i pick 'FK transform'.

then i connect another 'apex auto rig component', in attributes, this time, i pick 'bone deform'

Now i connect 'apex graph' or 'apex edit graph' to 'bone deform'.

inside 'apex graph'(accessed via apex's network view):
how to setup Blender's ACTION CONSTRAINT with 'Skeleton Blend' so that a "Clamped Slider" can drive a sequence of 'rig pose' nodes?

Some people say that, in Apex graph, 'pose blend' / 'Sop::blendshapes' / 'Character Blend Shapes Add' nodes can be used to achieve this. i dont how either.

However i want to do achieve this with 'sop::kinefx::skeletonblend'; after all i'm using same mesh....same rig skeleton...same joint names, but posing diff poses in unique 'rig pose' nodes.

We know that 'skeleton blend' can drive: T-pose to pose A; T-pose to pose B, etc....
= I dont want that.

I wanna drive an Animation frame sequence from T-pose,
i.e using an Abstract Control (driver) to drive T-pose to pose A,B,C,,,,etc.

i dont know Apex script. i'm a beginner who doesnt know programming. Hope some kind soul explains how to achieve this via 'apex graph'.

Thanks a lot to 'The Great' William Harley and 'max rose' for wonderful tutorials on APEX. Thanks.

oh! btw, i've also attached my failed attempt hip file. I've tried to ask chatgpt and gemini many many many many times about houdini's Apex graph. but failed. any way here's what i got till now.

here is a take on fixing the scene and the graph manually
I also added the FK controls on top of blendshaped skeleton where animator can apply further offsets

for reference some of the things that were updated:
- skeleton blendshapes are no longer packed as their points need to be accessible by APEX
- changed the Rigpose nodes to just apply rotations to joints, since offsetting the joints creates wrong deformation due to resulting orient misalignment of parent joints

in graph:
- added dict entry for base skeleton and fixed weight key from blend# to weight#
- fixed weight values to increase and decrease for specific regions
- added ability to have manual FK controls on top of blendshaped pose

OMG!!!! Thank you...Thank you ...Thank you ....
Just spent 5 hrs reverse engineering your modifications....node by node....

Finally figured it Out!!!!!!...And... its working!!!! Yeah!!!!

Your knowledge about apex is phenomenal.

how did u know all these? do u have programming background?

Can u recommend any resources to learn apex? python?

A million thanks once again for your help.

Now houdini can seriously rival maya in character animation.
and my friend u just made it a step closer.

May god bless u with Health, wealth, love and happiness.

glad to help, once you are happy with manually created graph as a prototype, next step would be creating it as a more procedural APEX script component so that it supports variable number of joints and blendshapes

while I have some rigging and programming background, I'm not up to date with specific APEX and Python houdini tutorials, but I'd just search the Learning Portal for APEX, there is already quite a few covering various parts of APEX, including APEX Script

if you want to link arbitrary animation to the abstract slider, I'd recommend using motionclips instead of blending individual poses
that way motionclip can provide complex animation consisting of large amount of poses and you just evaluate it in APEX with your abstract control mapped to the motion clip range

example attached

using Motion clips is even better!

however, there is no change in mesh when i scrub abstract ctrl.
currently i'm trying to understand, as you've arranged nodes in similar manner.




i just started learning vex.
Will scout the Learning Portal regarding apex too!

Thanks a lot for your kind and valuable guidance. will definitely try Learning Portal!