Frank Spalteholz

Before it's getting even more impolite, I want to say thank you guys! I have a lot of crunch-time at the moment, which takes me away from this project. Hope to get some time over the weekend to prep a little scene I want to share that makes more sense than my screenshots. I have a bazillion additional questions, but I don't want to spam this forum, so there was one guy mentioning discord-channels specifically for Houdini-rigging. I can't find them, so besides my problem here I'd really appreciate it if someone could tell me those.
Have a nice weekend ahead!

Hi!
I'm currently working on my first houdini rig (a simple car-rig) by using kinefx. I've skinned/captured all separate pieces by using a capturepackedgeo node. It's running in real time, but only until I've tried to add 4 blend shapes driving the absorber-springs. I've found no other solution than by separating the springs (base and target) with blasting, creating a blend shape node for each spring and piping this back into the geo using merge. To drive the length of each spring, I'm calculating a normalized custom value within a rig vop and piping this into the blend-channel. How would you set up something like this? Although I'm a beginner in houdini rigging I guess making a separate rig for the springs would help. But maybe I can keep everything as it is (with just one geo) and driving the primitives without blasting. I already tried so, but it seems that since this is a merged geo the vertex order for the base and the target primitive changes which makes it impossible (at least for me) to get it work.

Hope this makes sense.
Thank you!

Why would you need more than 3 joints for the main-arm (which is the default ik-setup anyway) + using a fk-rotation for the manipulator? You could limit the rotations using clamp-nodes.