https://www.ea.com/seed/news/open-source-dem-bones [www.ea.com]

So I noticed there was cool new plugin nodes for like some things like rizom Uv and quad remesher. Any chance there could be a node made from dembones from EA seed? It’s open source and the commands are made in dos, unless it’s easy to make and maybe I would try to make a node?

Moin,

according to the website you linked, Houdini already implements the method in its sideFX-Lab's Skinning-Converter [www.sidefx.com]. Could you elaborate what you would like to see that goes beyond this already being available since 2017?

Marc

I tried skinning converter on an alembic that failed. While dembones processed it pretty good.
Dembones also let's you feed in an fbx with bones preweighted to it and trains it to a cached animation. So you could use those as animation clips on an existing skeletal mesh in unreal or unity for example

Ah, I assume you filed the report (alembic failed) to the labs guys (formerly known as the game tools guys)? Because they'd be the ones who could fix it / help with getting it to work?

Point being: If there already IS an implementation, it would seem wiser to get that to work instead of doing it all over again (with potentially the same or similarly failing results).

Marc

I asked in another post if the implemented skinning converter could train an existing fbx. I was told it couldn't do that. It could only use points to create its own set of weights. So with the existing one, you couldn't use it for real-time skeletal mesh animation clip creation. It's more for just one offs I think

I am not sure, but you might be mixing up a few things there: A “rig” as it comes in through an FBX is not directly usable inside Houdini (because of that bones/joints thing).
So you would have to convert the FBX “rig” to a Houdini rig anyway, before you could “train” anything, as far as using a rig is concerned - that has nothing to do with being able to use a “proxy rig” of some kind that accumulates more complex deformations into combined ones.

I *think* what you are looking for is at least a two-step solution, if not a three-step one: Being able to convert FBX rigs into Houdini rigs (and vice versa) - something that I have worked on for a while and I can tell you, it is tricky - then an implementation of the “dembones” or proxy-rig on either side of the conversion (and then, possibly, a re-conversion back into your fbx-world).

In short, the implementation alone most likely isn't sufficient for what you have in mind. It may even work perfectly fine, but as long as your pipeline doesn't support the “rig conversion”, that doesn't help.


Marc

Nope, it doesn't need a rig at all. It just needs an alembic cache, and an fbx with preweighted bones on it,

The solver will translate and rotate the bones to match the cache and turn it into fbx animation

This allows you to use any tricks you want for the rig itself in any program, since all you need is cache

https://vimeo.com/138048608 [vimeo.com]
You can see at 1:20

The skinning converter implementation out of the base Houdini labs from my understanding doesn't have this capability

Apologies, I think we are talking about different things here. To me, “bones”, “weights” et cie *are* a rig. Please excuse my intrusion. The way I understand this approach is that an existing rig - even an automatically created one - gets new weights so that a given motion can be reproduced, even if the original animation used a different rig. I understand this as a “no-rig-to-rig” conversion, but it does need a rig (bones etc) in your target system.

I probably understood it completely wrong.

Marc

Ah no worries,

My rig terminology stems from Maya mostly. But I'm slowly attempting to move to Houdini since Maya sucks hah. But it's still my main tool unfortunately.

Dembones Does both methods actually. It can either create bones with weights based on some number of bones specified, or it can use an existing pre-weighted fbx. Which makes it pretty versatile compared to Houdini's current skinning converter

But Maya doesn't use bones (last time I used Maya in a rigging context - I am less than no expert in that!), it only “displays visual hints” and calls that bones. Houdini actually uses bones, so each bone in a rig sits at 0/0/0, parented to its respective bone. While you can convert between the two worlds, it is not straight-forward and with multiple dependencies, it can be messy.

That's what I meant by “you need to convert into a Houdini rig first anyway”.

Nevermind, that's more on the semantic side and doesn't solve your problem anyway, which I believe the labs-guys could tackle if there was enough demand. It might still be worth filing a report or enhancement-request.


Marc

Well they're basically just locators with their own orient space, and they're the only things you can use with skinning. So in that sense they're unique bone like objects.

Seems interesting with Houdini bones, reminds me of old xsi objects which have their own neutral pose and anything could be a bone deformer for skinned objects.

How does one file an enhancement request?

How does one file an enhancement request?

See here :-) [www.sidefx.com]

Marc

cool thanks!