So THATS how that works. Sweet!

See this is the kind of basic Houdini knowledge that I am sorely lacking. I am trying to watch tutorials that teach this kind of stuff as much as possible. Most of the tutorials talk about many other things, however, that don't apply to what I am doing or they teach something like this in the middle of some other larger tutorial. In that case I don't have time to watch all of the tutorials to learn all the little details while seeing all kinds of other stuff that I don't need to know.

Now if we could figure out the animation export thing I might have everything I need.

It sounds as though you're trying to get LOD's with this setup, tpitman? I ‘thought’ that the exporter/ROP had “autoDetails” feature within? If you are looking strictly for LOD's for rendering optimization; I'd say, look into those. Great you're sorting how to do it via HD's tools! AutoDetails is one of the nice features for an Artist in Torque; you don't need to ‘physically’ crunch the geometry yourself, just adjust some numbers in your exporter….and view the rendered result in the engine/viewer.

If you're looking for ‘LOD’s'/Levels Of Detail, I ‘think’ you can just ‘add’ another one via the ROP and fill in the ‘details’, using the geometry object as a reference, pretty sure of that, exporter does the rest. Instant/auto poly crunching….it's great. Fairly certain T3D supports it as well!

I saw that and thought about using it. I just tried it, however, and get an error. I have a single detail output just for this test. All I did was change the percent polys to .1 (it was 1).

Here is the output I get:

Adding node “Zombie_Auto_Rig_deform_rig/skin2” with parent “start01” to subtree rooted on node “base01”.
Attaching object to node.
Found multiRes data.
Adding object named “Zombie_Auto_Rig_deform_rig/skin”.
Adding mesh of size 2 to object “Zombie_Auto_Rig_deform_rig/skin” from multiRes of 0.100000.
Adding mesh of size 2 to object “Zombie_Auto_Rig_deform_rig/skin”.
Found two meshes named “Zombie_Auto_Rig_deform_rig/skin” of size 2.

This is an error, so it doesn't export.

Along with that here is another reason I am using poly reduce that maybe there is a better solution to:

My model has a texture on it with pants and shirt. When I do a poly reduction on it the texture gets messed up as the polygon count goes down. I would guess that is because the UV map doesn't match the polygons anymore.

What you see is the pants having spikes up into the shirt and the shirt spiking down into the pants as polygons that used to be some pants and some shirt end up spaning across that line.

So what I did was make a sub group that didn't include the polygons between the pants and shirt and applied the poly reduce to the rest of the polygons.

This works well, but if there is a way to solve the root problem of the texture mapping onto the new reduced polygons in the first place that would be better.

It must be because of the AutoRig multiple control objects…because I know that AutoDetails work very well, as I helped the ROP author in testing it out! I think the dancing orc you see in the brief export video was submitted by me, although I was a bit surprised to see a video produced with it, . And they didn't really go into exporting just the animation binary DSQ's at all…and not sure if the guy got the material to render or not…heh-heh…

Again, I found it difficult to weave in/out of the AutoRig tools to get a good export to Torque; good luck to you with the AutoRigs… I liked their control very much, but as I've seen with many programs exporting to Torque, what you get in the UI is not what might be capable in exporting/support to DTS…

So is there an answer to my problem then? Can I get some guidance on where to go from here?

Well, Tpitman…it is difficult to say.

As a developer, when I'm confronted with ‘time consuming’ delays in an area such as this, I re-evaluate the workflow/tool. Is this ‘awesome’ tool/modifier really ‘meaningful’ to my production needs, or can I do pretty much the same thing, in a different workflow.

At this point…I would move away from the ‘AutoRig’ toolshelf, and probably build my own rig and control system from the ground up, as the developers of the Digital Content Creator have don't have my precise workflow or asset requirements in the forefront of their minds when designing tools and modifiers…so, there ya have it. If I haven't gotten a good workflow established in a week or so…I move on to where I can get my production needs finished in a timely fashion. There are only 52 weeks in the year! Not enough to burn trying to invent the wheel, so to speak; but it's all a matter of time constraints. If I have the time, I'll pound away on something till I get it beaten into shape.

Keep on chuggin'!

PS: it sounds as though you need some really intense one-one tutoring with your assets and the tools to get things sorted. Usually I'll jump in on something like this, but our schedule at the current moment is not allowing me to burn any spare time, sorry I can't be of more help at the moment. Again, I beat on ‘AutoRig’ for a while and could not get it working to my satisfaction…..for what it's worth. That was at least a year ago….

Thank you for the recommendation. Many months ago I actually took that kind of approach. I basically just used the old fashioned bones method. I didn't have the time to do a rig with IK, so I just positioned the bones a key frame at a time and got something that is ok.

It is no where near as good as a real IK control system would give, but it got the job done.

I am keeping this thread alive in the hopes that I might get a solution eventually. I also hope to help SideFX get something that they can market to more game devs like me. auto rig would really help that. There are a ton of new Indie devs who are good coders, but not good asset creators. We are doing this as a hobby with no budget and so can't always hire or buy the assets.

If SideFX can get a tool that works end to end for people like me they open up a whole new market for themselves.