Melissa Spearman

arctor
right now (I mean actually right now) I'm recording a series of rigging tutorials for a standard Biped, very much in the style that would be familiar to a rigger coming from a Maya background, but no facial rigging (apart from a jaw and simple eyes). After that I'll be doing a series on capture and deform and theeeeen some facial rigging…so it'll be a while before I can get to them. But I'd say jump in and see what you can do - and ask any questions here, I'll try to help where I can and there are plenty of others willing to offer advice as you've already seen.

Hey arctor. Hope you're doing well today. May I ask you a couple of questions real quickly? The first question is this - where do you usually post the tutorials that you make online? I forgot to ask you that the last time that I was logged in at this forum . The second is this - how does the license renewal process work for Houdini Indie? I am about to do so for the first time and I heard that it can be quite the stumbling block for users. That is why I would like to renew my edition of the program to a multi-year license if it is possible.

arctor
oh, haha, sorry - I was going to make a quick example file - then I got called away and forgot all about it…
I'll post one later today




ok - here is a quick file:
there is a bunch of stuff going on here so have a good look through it, I only cover some of the uses of ‘sopcreateedit’
if you have any questions just ask…

Wow, thank you for sharing this with me arctor! This is quite enlightening . I hope you will be able to post your video tutorial soon, especially if the ‘zipper’ or ‘sticky lips’ setup will be mentioned. I would enjoy exploring concepts like that inside of Houdini.

arctor
you can add/extend the rigs produced by the Autorigs as much as you want - think of them just as a base starting point.

WaterBirdx2
Duplicating the head geometry to make the various blend shapes isn't a problem for me, but I do admit that I am rather intimidated by the idea that I might have to break apart the original geometry for the body

you DO NOT have to make duplicates of your mesh to create Blendshapes in Houdini.
see the attached file.
you can use a copy, or just make a series of changes to the mesh to produce the shape you want - then use the ‘sopcreateedit’ command - open a Textport and type: help sopcreateedit
this will make an Edit SOP that contains just the delta of your original mesh and the edited mesh - now you can get rid of any duplicate meshes and edits you might have made.
I'll be doing a full tutorial on this at some point - busy doing another tutorial series right now

That sounds excellent arctor. I am a big fan of visual aids, but I do not see an attached file to your post though. Do you post your tutorials to just this website, or are they available at other websites too? Is it also possible to create a preset out of a custom rig so that it could be applied to similar characters inside of Houdini? I know that the program has some functionality like that in regards to applying a pose that was created with one character onto a different character by using the pose library, so I think that getting a better understanding of parameters like this will make it easier for me to manage the development time for my characters.