Talen Herzig

And I just discovered that as suspected, the rotation/scale adjustment didn't work. It was functional for pushing the points OUT, but when trying to bring them back in, it didn't give me what I needed at all. Gah.

I'm having trouble with the steps around the 1 hour mark, specifically regarding moving the end points in and out along the curve. I feel like my point normals are oriented incorrectly, but am at a loss as to how to fix this, or why they are incorrect in the first place (I followed the steps earlier to the letter; did I miss something?) I made several attempts at multiplying or adding to the normals in the VOP network, but nothing gave me the desired results.

I know my Point VOP is operating correctly, as I dropped it into the downloaded scene files to test it.
Forgive me if I'm completely off here, still learning, but what I'm assuming is that the normal is aligned to the up vector of the point at those end CVs, so they're just moving along the local Y-axis. I tried rotating the end Path CVs in a later save (not uploaded), which had some success but only if I also scaled the points to 0 (specifically in the Z-axis), which I feel is a messy and incorrect solution, particularly since it doesn't match the downloaded scene files and I am concerned that will affect behavior further down the line.

Any help would be much appreciated. For now, I will continue with the rotate/scale solution and hope that works for now.

I haven't used FBIK before, but I can see why that would be nice. Hopefully something for future versions, although not by any stretch a dealbreaker for me at this point.

That's interesting, the geometry thing. You're probably right. I mean, with Blender, I have no issue doing most of the modeling elsewhere anyway, but it would be nice to be able to work in one app where possible.

The rigging is a little confusing, but I think with a bit of time and patience I can get my head around it. The concept of it from what I've encountered so far makes sense for me, it's just learning how to implement proper capturing of geometry and bone orientation so I have axes where I want them is the bit I'm stumbling on. Although, I made a lot of progress yesterday since posting this, so I think I see the strengths of it, and things like the Autorig are handy.

Mantra looks incredible. Obviously, once again for the more technically oriented but the results seem fantastic. Well worth learning for the price tag.

Thank you! I think I have a firmer idea of what I can and can't do within Houdini now. I think I'm going to stick to it, and maybe combine it with Blender to get the most out of it. It's too good to pass up.