Really interested to see some of the improvements, like Mantra startup speed for one, and FEM muscles, this is just awesome, I wonder if with this if we will see a speed improvement in the solver, maybe even usable cloth!!
I'm really looking forward to getting my hands on this!

Please include skinning decomposition, it will allow artists working in games to take advantage of Delta mush and the new muscles!

Fantastic release, can't wait to get my hands on the new rigging system, this will be a total killer for animators.

A word of caution, I would suggest not to go to crazy with the node network icons and allow the user to use the current ones if he prefers to do so, just saying.

Same than radial menues, great addition but let's not break shortcuts, they are too important.

KUDOS once again… amazing to see the speed of development.

That is super amazing…
New cookie node will add I can't wait for that.

Fantastic look-ahead! It will be great if we can bring characters into a games pipeline at last.

As mentioned in a couple of earlier posts, will we see any FBX export (and/or game-related) improvements (blends esp)?

I agree it'd be nice to choose between new and old style icons. I don't mind progress, but sometimes nice to take it one step at a time while actually working

peteski

HenrikVilhelmBerglund
I'm just hoping for .fbx blend shape export. It's crucial for game characters.

Agreed, it really surprised me this wasn't working, they are only going to be more common in games as things get more powerful.

AdamT
As mentioned in a couple of earlier posts, will we see any FBX export (and/or game-related) improvements (blends esp)?

I hear ya. The biggest difficulty with adding support for exporting Houdini's blend shapes to FBX is that Houdini's blend shapes support is *much* more general than FBX's blend shapes support. We'd need to have code to identify when a network happens to have exactly the right setup where it can be exported, and it'd fail in the vast majority of possible setups, so we'd need some way of trying to determine and then indicate to people what they need to change in order for it not to fail. Alternatively, we could slap together a bunch of heuristics to guess what might be closest, (which would also be a lot of work), but then it'd get into a mess of “Why doesn't this look like it did in Houdini?” Either way, there would still undoubtedly end up being some remaining differences.

If you really want it, though, please contact support to get added to RFE #70989 for FBX export of blendshapes, (unless you're already on it), and discuss recommendations there.

There's alembic support in the latest preview build of unreal engine. I've done a few simple tests exporting vertex level animation; I found unpacked (ie ‘baked’) ogawa seemed to come in pretty well for short clips, and the file sizes were reasonable. Longer ones crashed, but I haven't had much time to play.

Fbx has always scared me as trying to be all things to all men and pleasing no-one, but lets see. None of that stuff helps of course if you're in unity or some other engine.

ndickson
I hear ya. The biggest difficulty with adding support for exporting Houdini's blend shapes to FBX is that Houdini's blend shapes support is *much* more general than FBX's blend shapes support. We'd need to have code to identify when a network happens to have exactly the right setup where it can be exported, and it'd fail in the vast majority of possible setups, so we'd need some way of trying to determine and then indicate to people what they need to change in order for it not to fail. Alternatively, we could slap together a bunch of heuristics to guess what might be closest, (which would also be a lot of work), but then it'd get into a mess of “Why doesn't this look like it did in Houdini?” Either way, there would still undoubtedly end up being some remaining differences.

If you really want it, though, please contact support to get added to RFE #70989 for FBX export of blendshapes, (unless you're already on it), and discuss recommendations there.

A general skinning decomposition toolset would let people convert blendshapes to skinned joints for export to game engines. It would let people convert any mesh animation such as cloth/FEM to joints actually.

ndickson
I hear ya. The biggest difficulty with adding support for exporting Houdini's blend shapes to FBX is that Houdini's blend shapes support is *much* more general than FBX's blend shapes support. We'd need to have code to identify when a network happens to have exactly the right setup where it can be exported, and it'd fail in the vast majority of possible setups, so we'd need some way of trying to determine and then indicate to people what they need to change in order for it not to fail. Alternatively, we could slap together a bunch of heuristics to guess what might be closest, (which would also be a lot of work), but then it'd get into a mess of “Why doesn't this look like it did in Houdini?” Either way, there would still undoubtedly end up being some remaining differences.

If you really want it, though, please contact support to get added to RFE #70989 for FBX export of blendshapes, (unless you're already on it), and discuss recommendations there.

I wouldn't mind a new blend shape SOP just for .fbx export if adding support to the current one is difficult. Personally I want to make branches (copies) of the geometry so the vertex count would be the same, then modify the geometry with Edit or something and output that to a blend shape node, so nothing special really. Would this fail?

For now Blender works for me but I would rather make my characters in Houdini if it was possible.

ndickson
I hear ya. The biggest difficulty with adding support for exporting Houdini's blend shapes to FBX is that Houdini's blend shapes support is *much* more general than FBX's blend shapes support. We'd need to have code to identify when a network happens to have exactly the right setup where it can be exported, and it'd fail in the vast majority of possible setups, so we'd need some way of trying to determine and then indicate to people what they need to change in order for it not to fail. Alternatively, we could slap together a bunch of heuristics to guess what might be closest, (which would also be a lot of work), but then it'd get into a mess of “Why doesn't this look like it did in Houdini?” Either way, there would still undoubtedly end up being some remaining differences.

If you really want it, though, please contact support to get added to RFE #70989 for FBX export of blendshapes, (unless you're already on it), and discuss recommendations there.

I did post some suggestions in that RFE, basically to have a checkbox on the Blenshape SOP for making a FBX compatible setup, which in turn would store each blendshape as a 3fp generic attribute which could safely be transported down the SOP stream until output. Wouldn't that work?

nodeway
Then maybe you can go around this problem. Why don't you implement BGEO into UE4 instead.

i think bgeo exports only meshes
what would be interesting if it exports a code block (llvm bitcode) for unity and unreal.

nodeway
Anyway, maybe some other format not owned by Autodesk could be implemented. I think Pixar scene format supports rigs? Maybe it's time to add request to UE4 team to add support for it.

Possible future scenarios are just that, but FBX with animated blendshapes is a proven pipeline that works, now, from any other package except Houdini.

digitallysane
Possible future scenarios are just that, but FBX with animated blendshapes is a proven pipeline that works, now, from any other package except Houdini.

For sure, blend shapes are such a standard now, I think it would be better to implement them before anything else.

For the rest of my pipeline however, Houdini is awesome! I click one button and the character gets baked out to a super clean FBX rig, ready for the game. Blend shapes could be such a stumbling block though, if you ever need them you simply can't do it through Houdini.

By the way the new features look great! Sorry we've gone down this tangent

I have two small requests: please make the new smoothing tool available as a node (or update the existing one) and add check boxes in the Edit node for the “Make circle”, “Evenly space selection” and “Straighten selection” commands.

I have two small requests: please make the new smoothing tool available as a node (or update the existing one) and add check boxes in the Edit node for the “Make circle”, “Evenly space selection” and “Straighten selection” commands.

yes please!! make sure all those awesome edit features are available for procedural workflows too! I would take them as python commands too if it is too much work to put them in a SOP. Adding the edge loop commands to python helped a lot!

As this has evolved into a feature request thread (which isn't tracked or recorded in any way) I'm tempted to lock it down. I don't want you to get the idea that this is how you request a feature or bug fix in Houdini, because it most definitely is not.

If you've posted here requesting a feature, I strongly encourage you to log an RFE if you haven't already done so, lest it be lost to the sands of time.

How to log bugs and rfe's for Houdini:
https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/25347/ [sidefx.com]

http://www.sidefx.com/Support/report-a-bugrfe/ [sidefx.com]

Thanks for the reminder Chris, RFEs submitted!