Julien Carmagnac

Hello,

I export an walk animation clip with shape as an agent.
The animation is cached as "in-place" type to be ready compatible for crowd sim.

And it's works well at this point.
When loaded and checked with the "agentclipproperties" node, the walk anim is cycling well over time.

But now I want to cycle this clip to manualy animate the character along a curve instead of within a sim.
When I unpack the agent animation, I put a motionClipCycle node but I get a strange offset (cf. curved trajectory bellow).

I must now set a strange value in the "Shift Cycles" parameter to make it run straight.

Why my current cached "in-place" agent animation are so complicated to make it cycle when I unpacked my clip ?

Thank you.

Perception from outside is that houdini isn't a generalist software for doing simple task. Which is mainly wrong.
There a lack of "human" tutorials which don't go into network unnecessarily.

The fact, as others said, is that UX could be better and sop modeling tool hasn't well updated.

Hard to develop more without fall in a sort of wish list..
Just to name few points :
- Coming from a softimage background, pivot/handle/snap aren't well arranged here to make them as efficient as they must be to use (even if functionalities are here).


- About modelling tools, all little sop experience/ability improvement can make difference, listen feedbacks users and more invest time on it.
We all come from different horizons, just mix all ours feedbacks and get the best !

- There terribly missing 3d library models on houdini side.
The lack of a complete model file format (which include materials), sort of subscene, make unable to simply "share/sell" models. hda, as powerful it is, isn't adapted for this so simple task.
So it take it time at the beginning to build our 3d library and still the question is "how to save it ?".

- Management of external files is terrible : "Pre-Flight Scene.." way too long on larger scene with many dependencies (more than 30min) and unusable.
So we can't use references outside project structure folder and decide at the end to copy/move all dependencies to local (to share/archive project for example).


One real benefit of houdini that is we can work like in any other softwares, create geo, move, deform interactively inside viewport AND the bonus is we can go further with nodes when needed.

Hello, probably not the most elegant solution but still work here to prevent intersection.
Hope that help.


Other way would be to do more math and done this purely in vex.. but that's another task.