Mike Malinowski

Thanks for the feedback jordibares, it certainly sounds promising and I'll take a dive into it.

One of the things i loved about Soft was its model referencing system. A ‘model’ object would represent an encapsulation of sorts, and would allow you to export and import models, as well as reference models.

This is really powerful for developing character pipelines because it means your rig can be stored independently of your geometry, thus you can build an ever growing library of geometry components for the rig ( think customisable characters etc ). The skin is stored in the geometry, so when the skin is saved and re-referenced into a scene containing the rig the connections will be made. Doing this in Maya comes with a huge overhead of tool development and maintenance.

I will first apologise because i have not spent the time in Houdini and looked myself, but does Houdini have something to solve this issue? Would the following example be possible :

You build a rig in Houdini and create a HDA
You get some geometry, skin the geometry to rig. You save the geometry ( along with the skin ) in another HDA

Is it then possible to open a new scene and pull in both HDA's and ‘easily’ have the skin reconnect to the rig bones?

They key here is being able to store deformed geometry separately from the rig.

Thanks

Mike