CHARACTERS
Houdini 22 introduces a broad range of character workflow enhancements in support of both rigging and animation. These updates reduce setup time, improve consistency across assets, and provide animators with faster, more responsive tools for editing, retargeting, applying procedural motion, and creating complex character performances.
KineFX | Rigging
Character rigging improvements in Houdini 22 strengthen the connection between modeling, rigging, and animation. Focusing on smoother end-to-end workflows, the release streamlines common rigging tasks while improving interoperability between departments.
Key advancements include reusable rig templates, enhanced retargeting, and rig inversion,
enabling faster setup and more connected character pipelines.
Powered by APEX
Houdini 22 extends its procedural character workflows with new APEX-based rigging and deformation tools. From flexible rig customization to advanced facial animation, these improvements integrate seamlessly with existing animation pipelines, reducing setup effort while giving artists greater control over complex character performances.
Tumblehead | The frog rig integrates real-time CUDA deformers, custom HDAs, and APEX Script, enabling highly flexible procedural character deformation and creative rig customization.
Cedric | The Cedric rig highlights Houdini’s procedural approach to rigging characters, where deformation, animation, and effects remain integrated throughout production.
Facial Rig | Cedric's Facial rig combines FACS blend shapes with wrinkle deformation and flexible 2D controls. This reduces sculpting while improving animation workflow and expressiveness.
Rigging Examples
Houdini 22 enhances procedural rigging with reusable templates, interactive rig controls, and improved support for Gaussian Splats. These updates accelerate character setup, simplify adapting rigs across related assets, while providing more flexible, intuitive control interfaces.
Rig Transfer | Adaptive rig templates automatically configure, remap, and customize diverse character rigs, accommodating varying proportions while preserving reusable controls .
Drawables | Image-based rig controls offer customizable, screen-space widgets, scalable viewport icons, and improved control visualization for intuitive character interaction.
GSplat Rigs | Gaussian Splats integrate directly into existing rigging workflows, with reusable rig templates and interactive LODs enabling efficient animation and asset reuse.
Bipeds
Houdini 22 introduces a more automated biped character pipeline, simplifying rig creation while facilitating skeleton standardization and motion transfer. New templates, guided workflows and retargeting tools reduce manual setup while improving consistency across characters from different sources. This makes it easy to quickly move from imported assets to production-ready animation.
Rig Setup | Rigging recipes and templates accelerate biped setup with guided customization, automatic joint alignment, procedural selection sets, and improved animator-focused viewport controls.
Transfer to FBX | Imported FBX rigs with unique skeleton names and orientations can be matched to standardized biped templates for consistent rigging and animation.
Biped Retarget | Biped retargeting automates skeleton mapping, rest pose generation, and orientation matching, enabling robust animation transfer across diverse character rigs.
Mocap Transfer | Houdini 22 streamlines biped motion-capture retargeting, providing automated workflows for transferring animation efficiently across compatible character rigs.
Set Driven Key
Houdini 22 introduces streamlined procedural tools for building and animating set driven relationships. New APEX workflows simplify rig creation while giving animators intuitive controls that remain fully editable, making it easier to author mechanical systems, reusable setups, and layered performances that support creative control.
Rig Setup | Set Driven Keys layer procedural animation onto controls while preserving full animator control for additional keyframing and shot-specific adjustments.
APEX Rigpose | APEX Rig Pose and Set Driven Keys simplify procedural mechanical animation, enabling intuitive, graph-free creation of reusable driven-control setups.
APEX | Rigging Tools
Houdini 22 extends APEX with tools that simplify developing, debugging, and refining procedural rigs. These tools reduce technical overhead while making it easier to build custom systems, iterate on complex setups, and produce reliable results for animation.
Rig Inversion | Rig inversion automatically handles extreme skeletal changes, applying procedural stretching to produce plausible deformations while preserving animation quality.
Debug | The new APEX Debugger visualizes graph values in the viewport, simplifying debugging, validation, and development of custom procedural rigging systems.
AI | The APEX Script comfort package adds AI-assisted coding, autocomplete, validation. This is a preview for a tool which will be released later on.
KineFX | Animation
Houdini 22 introduces animation workflow improvements that keep complex scenes responsive while making character interaction more efficient. New performance optimizations, customizable animation interfaces, and enhanced facial editing tools help animators work more fluidly, from blocking performances to refining expressive facial animation and lip-sync.
Performance | Parallel rig evaluation enables real-time playback and editing of multiple full character rigs, maintaining interactive performance across complex animation scenes.
Maya Hotkeys | In the Hotkey manager choose the APEX-traditional Animation keymap to access Maya hotkeys such as S for Set Keyframe when working in the Scene Animate context.
Character Picker | The new APEX Character Picker provides customizable visual control layouts, selection sets, and multi-pane interfaces for faster, more intuitive character animation.
Facial Anim | APEX adds facial cameras, flexible control layouts, and pose libraries, streamlining lip-sync and facial animation with focused, customizable workflows.
Motion Mixer
Houdini 22 expands Motion Mixer with Nested Clips, making it easier to organize, reuse, and iterate on animation sequences. Combined with improved clip blending and transitions, these workflows simplify timeline management while supporting non-destructive editing and efficient construction of more complex character performances.
Motion Mixer | Motion Mixer adds nested and transition clips, simplifying animation assembly, reuse, blending, and editing while preserving flexible, non-destructive workflows.
Nested Clips | Nested Clips streamline production animation by organizing multiple tracks into reusable, blended sequences that simplify editing and iterative refinement.
Motion & Physics
Houdini 22 expands its animation toolkit with faster editing, more interactive physics, and streamlined workflow controls. New Full Body IK and Ragdoll enhancements reduce manual keyframing. This simplifies iterative changes and makes it easier to blend procedural simulation with artist-directed animation to maintain responsive, non-destructive workflows.
Full Body IK | Full Body IK enables targeted animation edits using intuitive controls, preserving surrounding motion while minimizing manual keyframe and curve adjustments.
Ragdoll Forces | New Ragdoll forces add wind, turbulence, magnets, and damping, enabling controllable procedural secondary motion with per-collision-shape adjustments.
Ragdoll Physics | Ragdoll impact thresholds automatically trigger physics and destruction from velocity, simplifying animation revisions while reducing manual timing and activation management.
Animating with Gaussian Splats
Houdini 22 broadens the role of Gaussian Splats beyond visualization, integrating them into interactive animation workflows. Artists can treat splats as editable scene elements, combining procedural motion, physics, and character interaction to create dynamic, real-time environments that remain efficient to manipulate.
Bar | Gaussian Splats can become interactive animation assets, enabling editable props, GPU-efficient sets, and seamless character interaction through procedural animation and Ragdoll physics.
Wasp | Secondary Motion extends Gaussian Splat animation with procedural lag, jiggle, and spring effects that blend seamlessly with keyframed motion.