Kevin Traywick

Thanks Will, this is good to know. Someone on Reddit mentioned the animation catalog which worked perfectly.

Basically I want to save out separate animation clips for each rig in an animation scene for reuse.

I have 2 spline rigs in an APEX scenes. I have added them using Apex Scene Add Character and animated each separately. I want to save out the animation clip for each animated spline, e.g., grass_fast.clip and grass_slow.clip, to apply to more copies of the same rig.

The problem I'm having is saving out just the clip for reuse on another rig. I can Split Packed Folder after the Scene Animate and get the /animation folder and then unpack that folder but it doesn't show the transform values in the geometry spreadsheet, just the Transform Object (joint) names. And when I ROP Geo that sequence out, it doesn't come in with Apex Scene Add Animation.

I think I'm missing something simple here. AFAICT, the docs and APEX tutorials all skip this step as either after rigging or before animation. If anyone can point me to a tutuorial or docs that do, I would really apprecite it.

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.