Hi,

I posted some files on my blog if somebody is interested how to do a stretchy spine.
Any feedback is welcomed

cheers
calin

Sweet, really interesting…I'll have a look!

I really wish there would be more material on rigging for Houdini…
Without ausin autorig that is…

I'll try to post as often as I can. If you're looking for something in particular please let me know


cheers
calin

hi Calin!

I took a quick look at the strechy spine and the strechy spine houdini way.
It seems like a really nice setup, but I don't understand exactly how you could skin a character using cubes instead of bones(in the houdini way).

Once this is done, what are the steps to skin it, do you have to make bones follow the cubes or something like that?

this is really interesting, thanks alot!

jrgauthier
Once this is done, what are the steps to skin it, do you have to make bones follow the cubes or something like that?

this is really interesting, thanks alot!

To understand you just have to look at the autorig tools that Calin developed while at Sidefx. You will notice that there are two rigs - an animation rig and a deform rig. The deform rig looks at either bone locations or nulls in the animation rig to get their positions and orientation. These are then used to create either nulls with muscles attached for capturing or actual bones. This two rig approach gives you a lot of options.

You could do as Rob suggested or if you are a fan of all in one kind of a rig you could copy metaballs instead of cubes and used the meta capture sop to do the deformation. The possibilities are endless, you could copy nulls onto each point then use the muscle object. That way you could tweak the shape of the body off spine sort of speak.

cheers
calin

ps. I'll show the capturing process, “the Houdini way”, after I'm done with all the rigging bits.

Is there any twist option for the spine?
Right now when I move back and forth the spineCtrl2, the spine does a weird twist…Is it possible have a twist control per controller and one global for the move back?

Is there any twist option for the spine?
Right now when I move back and forth the spineCtrl2, the spine does a weird twist…Is it possible have a twist control per controller and one global for the move back?

Does anyone know where I can get the sample files from the blog (http://vanillarigging.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html [vanillarigging.blogspot.com] )? The linked files seem to be dead (e.g., empty)

sorry to bump this thread…