Hi XSI users! I did my second rig in Houdini, I'll try to animate it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qRagQTsE4E&feature=youtu.be [youtube.com]

looking good
how are you doing your deformation stacks?

pretty sweet.
when will you share it? :mrgreen:

It's cool. Looking forward to the animation.

Very nice.

On the subject of your facial controls.

The problem i always have with these types of rigs is there are so many channels to keep track of.

They are super intuitive but in the end i always opt for controls Inner Brow Up/Down etc instead of curves that have separate XYZ channels. Problem is using Set Driven Key (ala Blendpose or Lookup chop isn't as intuitive as it needs to be and some scripting effort is required to make it more automated/streamlined).

Are you using any Set-Driven-Key-like setups in your rig?

Max - this is looking really nice.

I'd love to hear what you think of the rigging workflow in houdini, especially as related to bendy/squishy cartoon rigs that require layers of deformations and shapes.

Are you rigging the same way you did in xsi ?(I'm assuming that's where you're coming from). Or have you had to adapt to new methods? How is the performance of the rig?

Thanks!

animation test

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pG_XkCdys8&feature=youtu.be [youtube.com]

screenshots of rig

http://xsirussian.blogspot.ru/2014/07/blog-post.html [xsirussian.blogspot.ru]

Thank you all, I will answer later.

scene with a character

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/96857127/Alien.rar [dl.dropboxusercontent.com]

Keith, in Houdini there is one powerful feature. I can edit the rig anywhere, without having to rebuild anything. Other one - I can copy part of rig just do copy-paste. Of course, I used the knowledge that i gained at xsi. But xsi and houdini are very very different…

“thank you a lot” avtodesk.

phrenzy84, To do face rig I used a mix from blendshapes and bones. You can see it in scene from my dropbox.

It is very generous of you to share the scene. Cheers.

Hi Max,

I have a question about your scene. When I grab a controller and translate it “screen up” it goes “screen up” as in Softimage (using the center of the gnomon). But when I try to do the same in a new scene, it just translates in the XZ plane (which feels really weird…)

How did you manage to have this behavior? Is is a preference? Is is an object attribute?

Thanks in advance.

If I'm not mistaken, the behavior you are seeing has to do with whether the viewport grid is visible. If the grid is turned off, grabbing the center handle of the transform will move it in screen space. If the grid is visible, it will move in a plane parallel to the grid. Try turning the grid on and off and see if that does it.

Thanks so much Keith,
I was going crazy trying to figure out what was causing that behavior.

Carioca
How did you manage to have this behavior? Is is a preference? Is is an object attribute?

You can also try the view alignment. Right-click on the handle and choose Align Handle > View.