Character setup and animation involves three stages: rigging, animation, and finaling.
In Houdini, you usually separate the responsibilities of technical setup of a character and the creative animation process with digital assets.
The technical director can encapsulate characters as digital assets so to the animators the character becomes just like any other Houdini tool, with its own interface.
This lets the TD promote handles and parameter controls to the asset’s interface for use by animators, and the animator can use this high-level interface while the TD or rigger continues to refine the rigging, capturing, and facial setup.
As new versions of the character are completed, you can seamlessly update the asset to make the latest controls available to the animators. You can also use this technique to animate with lo-fi characters and swap in hi-fi characters at render time.
