danfitz82
kodra
I was excited about the new tools H20 provides. But I think we have to ask: is this really the future of rigging? I thought the premise of KineFX was some kind of modular rigging. Now we go back to a monstrous network with 5000 nodes...?
The final APEX graphs of a rig are pretty intimidating, but I think the future will bring more ways to author those networks - part of the power of them being geometry is that there's lots of potential for editing them in SOPs. The autorig components are a start but tough to tweak to create custom rigs. It's early days and we just don't have all that potential yet. That's my hope!
I hope so.
My experience with APEX so far is that it's nearly impossible to author APEX rig by hand. And it's very hard to read one, too.
Here is a criticism to Maya, from cgwiki:
Ironically, this is exactly how I feel about APEX. Perhaps at the end of the day, Maya be like that for a reason...
From my view as a programmer, while APEX is technically between SOP and VEX (according to SideFX at least), APEX is actually
assembly of Houdini. It's conceptually extremely low level. So low level that instead of a loop that iterates 10 times, you use 10 nodes.
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Sorry for the rant below:
I hope I'm wrong, but it feels like SideFX is occupied by
Architecture Astronauts [
www.joelonsoftware.com]. There is just no obvious reason why APEX is designed as it is. Why is the APEX graph "geometry" at all? Yes, you can
technically encode a graph as a geometry. You could have probably found a way to encode tasks, USDs, textures and any other data into geometry. Whether you should do it is another different story.
It's typical way how mathematicians think: we invent the concept of "Group" and now we can fit a lot of completely different math operations into this category. It was a huge mathematic milestone, but it's almost unexplainable to someone who doesn't work in relative fields why we grouped seemingly unrelated things into a group called group.
Evidently, SideFX already calls heightmap "2D volume". Heightmap isn't volume for 99.99% of people, just like an executable graph isn't a geometry.
I really hope SideFX can take a step back and rethink how they design the software. APEX doesn't feel like it's designed for some customers' needs. It feels like someone who is extremely smart and good at thinking on high abstraction level came up with an idea: "Well I just realized graphs can be represented as geometries, interesting isn't it?" And they spend 50 man-years to implement UIs and tools around this single idea.
It's amazing that they made it work to some extent. An engineering miracle. But it won't make Houdini the industrial standard for character animation. Actually I believe the two videos on the official youtube channel drove more animators/riggers away than they attracted.
Obviously, it's already way too late to redesign APEX again, but it's more like a general concern.