Kevin Traywick

maxmax003
I think one thing that makes houdini feel harder to learn is that is harder to understand how nodes should be sequenced to work, I know this might sound dumb for people using houdini since the beggining, but like in maya, for rigging, the menus for joints, constrains, skinning, etc, are kind of in a sequence, they also are all grouped so you kind of go exploring a bit and following the interafe. In houdini all the nodes are in your face, you hit tab and node galore!, lol, so you have to know what you are looking for before hand, in that regard it feels like learning blender, there is a hotkey for everything, but no way to find it(it was worst before), so who would guess you need to pack a character before using it without watching a tutorial or examples, and I feel that kind of black boxes the rig, in maya you have all in there all the time, I know the apex graph etc... but that goes to the other side, where you could also in maya use the hypergraph(a long time ago) to help understand what your rig is doing. Also looking into the docs, you could look for a node, but it doesn't says what kind of nodes it needs before to make it work, they are like you need a string(in other words a geo path).... I feel the docs are too technical sometimes. And to be honest I wish I had started my 3d journy with houdini, now that I'm older I feel I have to read everything twice and I think only half makes sence, watching tutorials makes me sleepy, etc...old guy stuff.

They could help this by requiring an image of a basic node layout in every help doc. They have it in a few, like for each loops, but they are rare. Getting to a basic node graph layouts is why there are so many Houdini tutorials I think. I remember this from way back when learning the lattice node, magnet nodes, etc.

Mirko Jankovic
For me honestly it is a big step forward BUT I'm personally missing some details from full rigging process like from scratch start on kineFX skelelton, taging and then on to both autorig and the rest. Somehwo I fill in with misc tutorials here and there but still have these holes of information that are stopping for fully embracing it.
So I hope some nice tutorial with update for H21 and complete process will appear or even detailed course that would start from rigging ball with two legs up to human and other characters. Something that will focus on artistic side and not ve and scripts and things
But it is big step forward for sure.
Lack of free time to focus on learning does affect as well so others probably are far more successful

Same. I'm one of a subset of Houdini users that has never touched Maya. I like KineFx so APEX made me want to dive into rigging but sorting out the language / UI of the Apex Autorig Components has me stumped. Diving into the APEX graph helps but yeah, painful.

I thought this too, that you added tags, parms and promotes to a guide skel and it was an additional skeleton for that purpose. The language around APEX is really confusing to me.

You can tag all of the spline nodes "spline" and use that in the Segments parameter (as "spline" not #spline).