Esther Trilsch

ahhh very cool! Thanks so much for sharing this @AntonMoss !!!
i have seen quite a lot of flavours of reverse feet in maya. for now the default reverse foot is fairly classic and we kepts the foot roll on purpose seperate on the abstract controls and leave all reverse pivots exposed. It is a fairly save middle ground between giving something for automation, but also expose maximum control.

Just sharing a moment of what i have seen and also done in production, and the realities of it. Cause i got burned with that too
Coupling main controls to automated behavior always looks amazing and is super fun to build for a rigger, unfortunately you can get you proper pushback from some animators. And then you spend a lot of time building that automation and it looks very awesome and you are soooo happy as a rigger, but the animators instantly turn it off cause they can not set the exact angle they want to set when then want to set it.

This is of course just what i have seen so far and absolutely nothing speaks against building a setup like this. Thats the cool part about rigging that there are so many different solutions and so many different types of animators . I can only recommend to really ask your animators if they like automated setups before adding them, to save yourself and the animators a moment of unhappiness

You need to give all the nodes you do not want to modify a tag called REFERENCE in the graph SOP. You can even delete them and it would still work. That way only you modifications get merged in and the upstream updates of your input graph properly show up..it also make the fuse step a loooot faster if you do that.

In other words we really only care on the edit graph SOP about the stuff you want to merge in not the rest. The rest is completely ignored, so it's not important if it's up do date or not of if you delete because it's not going to be used for the fuse process. And only the fuse process on the auto rig component node is the step that then takes the updated rig into account so you need to look there, not at the edit grap for the procedural update behavior!

You can use the fuse graph workflow this is designed exactly for that. It allows manual graphs edits that then get procedurally fused into the main rig graph.

Go to the Fuse Graph Section in this Tutorial section here:

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/intro-to-rig-builder/ [www.sidefx.com]

And here is also a walk through from the docs:

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/character/kinefx/customrigs.html [www.sidefx.com]