What's the simplest way to correct the orientation of a bone in Houdini? I come from Maya/Blender, where it could be done in the attribute editor/roll option respectively, but in Houdini I can find no such option in any of the parameters.
I have two bone chains for the fingers, but one curls the fingers in the +X rotation, while the other curls in the -X.

The only options I've come up with are parenting to a null object and using a look at to the next bone, but it's exceedingly slow and painful. While precise, I end up messing things up and causing odd errors, and wasting time. The other is to select the bones, switch the manipulator using the Bone tool with the Y key to the rotation widget, and rotate around the Z-axis, which is infinitely faster, but not as precise and I would like at times.

Any suggestions? New user, and google just isn't helping. Cheers for the help.

Just stumbled upon this thread, would be look if Houdini had a feature to auto align bone roll orientation or something similar.

Moin,

if I understand your problem correctly, then using the “Align Capture Pose” tool in the Rigging Shelf is what you are looking for. The general use for this is to (ignoring what you are doing to the geometry for a moment) rotate the bone the way you want it to be in correct “setup state”, then click on the “Align Capture Pose” tool. That will push the current rotation to the setup state and zero out the animation (pose) state.
If you have to correct the following / depending bones, just click on each of the bones while the align-capture-pose tool is still active, it will simply push the current state of each bone you click on into setup state, “auto-correcting” your pose.

I hope this helps! More in my “Full Houdini Rigging And Animation Course” later 2017

Marc

malbrecht
Moin,

if I understand your problem correctly, then using the “Align Capture Pose” tool in the Rigging Shelf is what you are looking for. The general use for this is to (ignoring what you are doing to the geometry for a moment) rotate the bone the way you want it to be in correct “setup state”, then click on the “Align Capture Pose” tool. That will push the current rotation to the setup state and zero out the animation (pose) state.
If you have to correct the following / depending bones, just click on each of the bones while the align-capture-pose tool is still active, it will simply push the current state of each bone you click on into setup state, “auto-correcting” your pose.

I hope this helps! More in my “Full Houdini Rigging And Animation Course” later 2017

Marc

Thanks for the help!

Looking forward to that course, there is for sure a huge gap in good animation and rigging courses for artists in Houdini.