I'm getting my feet wet with Apex rigging and I'm running into some issues.

Is it possible to hide geometry when painting weights using the "joint capture weight" SOP ?

I added the "visibility" SOP to hide some geo , and that works until I want to start painting weights. So it's very hard to paint overlapping geometry .


Does anyone know if this is possible ?

Thanks.

Another question would be if it's possible to use multiple "joint capture biharmonic" SOPs to control different parts of a character ?
I tried connecting a second "joint capture biharmonic" SOP into the 1st one , but I guess would be too easy. Then only the last one has an effect.

Figured out this one myself : just activate "blend factor" and the second joint capture becomes active.

I asked this exact question to SideFX support and they told me that I should just split the geometry before painting and merge them back. This is so-called "procedural way."

This kind of thinking reveals why the UI of most interactive nodes in Houdini just suck, imo.

Normal sane user's train of thoughts: I'm painting the weight, but some geometry is getting in the way. I want to hide them. I know there is a node about hiding geometry, which is Visibility SOP. So I use that.

So-called "procedural thinking": Just split the geometry beforehand. It's the most obvious thing to do. And of course we will have to merge them back procedurally. Which means to weld points, otherwise all the points on the split seams would be duplicated. Which means we'll need to sort/assign indexes beforehand to ensure the order doesn't change. Which means probably 3~4 extra nodes for this simple task. Which means you probably want to make a HDA for that. Which means you should document that so the next person handles this .hip knows what's going on...

All this because Joint Capture Paint SOP doesn't behave and respect _3d_hidden_primitivesgroup. But hey, we've got proceduralism!

Ouch , thats a bummer , not very "procedural" no.

Lets hope this has gotten some attention in the upcoming H22 then.

But especially with rigging Apex or KineFX , Houdini is as procedural as my grandma , whenever I adjust anything downstream the whole rig breaks.

Especially in this regard Houdini is a huge step back compared to how easy rigging in XSI was me thinks.

toonafish
Ouch , thats a bummer , not very "procedural" no.

Lets hope this has gotten some attention in the upcoming H22 then.

But especially with rigging Apex or KineFX , Houdini is as procedural as my grandma , whenever I adjust anything downstream the whole rig breaks.

Especially in this regard Houdini is a huge step back compared to how easy rigging in XSI was me thinks.

Yeah, but I highly doubt they'd improve or even care about manual weight painting... when H20.5 was released, Joint Capture Weight just threw a python exception. It didn't work at all unless you changed the built-in python code. That's how much SideFX cared about manual weight painting (ALL the example files are automatically weight painted too. It seems that they're trying to make manual weight painting obsolete.)