rikjoh

I agree the animal work is amazing. It blows me away too. The step up to sympathetic digital human characters is still very big, and to be possible for individuals working primarily from commercial library art, it's a huge step. If I didn't feel it was getting tantalizingly close, I'm sure I wouldn't bother to push it.

Maybe I'm misinterpreting your comment …. did you see the stuff from framestore? or core? Clearly this has been done well.

Sorry Andrew, I checked the framestore web site but couldn't identify anything human that was done with Houdini. Do you have a link? If someone has a good link to a concrete example, it would really help me move on.

Of course, I'm talking about ordinary human characters with skin, hair, eyes and clothing that are fairly realistic, not too cartoonish, and not tweaked from live footage.

I would think Houdini would be a better animation package with auto-rig / muscles / etc. Just import into Houini as an .obj, spend some time and make a great rig (there's a human skeleton on exchange), and great shaders, and there you go.

Actually, that's what I figured too, which was why I asked for the reality check. The more I think it through, admittedly knowing next to nothing about Houdini, the more problems I think there are going to be.

I would love to see some good examples of it if it has been done. If the examples don't exist by now I doubt it can be done well.