We got a chance to take a look at some of the new features in Houdini5
the other night (thanks for the beer and pizza SESI by the way), and I
was quite impressed with the improvements especially the modeller
although I guess we can't really call it a modeller anymore; instead a
more intuitive hands on access to the tools. l think they've found that
compromise between proceduralism and easy workflow and intelligent
history that is missing from 3D packages.
We got a look at the character tools and they have the same "do
everything in the viewport" approach. I was really impressed with how
easy it was to set up bones and size the capture regions now that you
don't have to jump back and forth to the sops. It's still early on with
these tools and I know they will have several different approaches to
weighting and capturing, but if they're going to keep the capture
region/sausages, I hope they work it so that you have the same ease of
adding several capture regions within a bone. Another person at the
meeting mentioned this and I too like to merge together my capture
regions to give more control over the weighting. Going into that
spreadsheet gives me the willies no matter how easy they're going to
make editing it. If I could put in several capture regions and edit
them as easily as you can one capture region with the new tools, it
would strike me as being much more intuitive and faster than trying to
paint the weights on with artisan; and you get all those little muscle
shaped deformers already in place. And if the capture regions acted
more like meta balls instead of capped tubes, you'd get even more
control over the shape of the regions.
Jim
