OK pet peeve, pose tool is Ctrl R but it's nowhere in the docs! now that I have that off my chest.. it is lovely as it's the only thing that gives us an IK handle on a rotation channel but it's impossible to find for newbies, it should be as simple as select, translate or rotate

I have to deal with frustrated animators a LOT.. only scratching the surface here. So many cool things about animating in Houdini but still so many bugs and unfinished toolsets!

snap quiz, how many people use the pose tool?

Hi Louis,

Agreed that there are many things that feel unfinished. I personally don't use the pose tool for bones in an animation context, so don't have the problem with the IK handle popping up. One bug bear I do have is that activating the pose tool kills the current object selection, which just makes things more long-winded than they should be

Henry

Ah the pose tool is fabulous, it just is a bit hidden at the moment, I'd love to see a shiny little icon for it next to the rotate button. It's great the way it makes a temporary IK handle for you in the viewport.

Anyone using the pose library? My only peeve there is that it needs to be able to apply partial poses, currently only works if the pose/clip has been saved with just a subset of channels selected. So if you have a walk clip but you just want to apply the leg animation, you have to apply the clip to a vanilla rig, just scope the channels you want and save a new clip. It should really be able to just write to the currently scoped channels in the destination rig. It's a pretty easy fix but would make a big difference, I can see that code getting hacked (with curses) in the near future!

louis dunlevy
I'd love to see a shiny little icon for it next to the rotate button

already RFE'd.

louis dunlevy
Anyone using the pose library? My only peeve there is that it needs to be able to apply partial poses, currently only works if the pose/clip has been saved with just a subset of channels selected.

there is an RFE for this (and a few other useful things).

Ok, now I'd love to know if other people are hitting some of these animation/rig performance issues. Some of these have been around for a while now in previous releases so I'd love to get other user's experience.

- viewport updates
very often what you see is not what you get with the viewport. Alembics suffer more from this but it's not just that format. Currently on Nvidia driver 375.66 on Ubuntu but I'm not sure we're seeing the benefit of that update just yet, anyone else seeing this?

- deleting keyframes and channel dependency updates
various bugs relating to deleting keyframes, using undo and so on. Ctrl Z has been deleting unrelated keyframes. Sometimes you can delete keyframes but the rig update in the viewport is incorrect. Anyone else experienced this? AGain it's rare but very annoying.

- freezing controllers - pose tool -channel references
This might be specifically linked to the pose tool in that it may not be traversing through the channel links cleanly and returning viewport handle interactivity. Often an animator will select a controller and drag it in the viewport and it will simply freeze. The user has to reselect it again to get it moving and then it's ok.

All of these issues are really hard to reproduce easily for bug reports so I'm quite curious to see if it's affecting other people on other platforms. We can build massively complex rigs really easily in Houdini but we need the animation experience to be flawless

Your not alone, and it's not specific to the platform your using. I'm on windows and I experience similarities to what you have described.

I would hope that you would find some ‘common thread explanation’ of all your related issues and submit, not a bug, but an rfe.

I've been using Houdini for almost 2 years now, and have held back on an rfe for that entire time until only just recently; just to make sure it wasn't due to inexperience using Houdini - being a beginner.

What the request was for is some kind of ‘Comprehensive’ reset “Button” for the entire hip file.

At times, when creating/working on a scene you do something in your workflow that causes Houdini to ‘dislike’/error out and this creates a ‘Hiccup’ in the file.

The reason I say in the file is because even though sometimes, say for example, setting a parameter to an erroneous value, causes Hudini to ‘Hiccup’; Simply returning that parameter value to it's previous ‘Houdini friendly’ value is not always enough .

As many probably experience there's a whole range of trial and error attempts to get Houdini working again in such a case (after returning to the working previous value):

Double Click to first frame.
Switching on/off the display/bypass flags of the node and related nodes that it is associated with.
Copying and Pasting node deleting original.
Create new scene/render/ or other window pane type.
saving and closing file and all instances of Houdini. Re-open file.

There's probably more ‘methods’ I have done in the past I can't think of to get Houdini to reset, but those are just some of the more common examples.

I even had a case recently, that where I had copied and pasted a node to get the file to reset which had no relation - as far as end-user composed scene is concerned, relationship to the ‘bugged’ parameter setting of another node.

I had spent an hour doing all the above to get the scene to reset, and it was only by chance that I just finally got it to reset by muckng about with other ‘unrelated’ nodes. Could have been at it another hour since there were many other nodes I could have flaged/unflaged/delete/paste/saved/re-open..etc.

Your right, it's one of those things which make it hard to replicate.

At the same time, what I suspect is the ‘cause’ is not so much a design flaw but just the nature of a piece of software that gives you control to create in many different ways - that it becomes inevitable that such ‘hiccups’ will show up from time to time.

Having said that, if there was a way for them to develop a true “Reset Button”, that would be great; Meaning something that will set the file to your current settings (settings/parameters that have been ‘corrected’ to the state that allows the file to be returned to a working status as such like when one of the above possible solutions had to be taken).

Another alternative to rectify getting out of such a situation is to have your back-up cycle set to often, like every 5 -15 minutes, so as to prevent too much loss of time.

However, having a “Comprehensive Reset” option I think is more helpful in terms of debugging and learning for future reference about what Houdini ‘likes’ and doesn't like.

No1 issue here is that Handles/Guides crash Houdini on MacOS therefore precluding much Posing work!