Can anyone point me to any kind of guide on rigging a character in Houdini and then sending it over to Unreal 5.1 for animation?

Thanks

Paul

Hello

in short You need a functional hda of Your character and the unreal engine plugin working in unreal.

The creation of a hda is well documented, You can find a lot of information about in the documentation or more character specific here: https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/kinefx-rigging-fur-dude/ [www.sidefx.com]

The installation of the engine plugin is covered here: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/unreal/_getting_started.html [www.sidefx.com]

this should get You started. But for characters unfortunately You won't get usable view port handles for Your character controllers as this is not supported. I tried it with unreal and Maya but no luck.

I asked sidefx for this and they might look into this, as for now it is not possible.

It would open a hole knew world of collaboration if we could rig in Houdini and get animators in Maya to work with these rigs, as, at least in my experience, most animators want to work in Maya for many reasons. anim bot (https://animbot.ca/home/) is just one of them

Thanks!

Yeah, we're not having much luck. I teach at MTSU these days and a lot of the students are interested in moving their final projects over to Unreal simply due to the speed of getting decent quality work out of it. But, despite having at least one former Softimage guru (Jeremy Passerin) working on rigging in Unreal, the whole thing is a bit of a mess.

I don't use nor do I teach Maya, but the department uses it exclusively for teaching 3D character animation. I'd hoped, since SideFX has such a cozy relationship with Epic, there might be something brewing between the two that would make it easier to set up a character in Houdini and send it over to Unreal for animation. Then I'd have an excuse to also get the department to consider adding or switching from Maya to Houdini for animation. (my secret plan has been revealed! hahaha!)

If anyone from SideFX Labs sees this - please consider this as an opportunity. Maya to Unreal is still really difficult. Trying to use Omniverse and USD as some kind of middleman is way too difficult and requires too much setup (at least in a university setting). All I really want is the ability to set up a basic rig on a character in Houdini, send it over to Unreal and have the rig go along for the ride. I personally don't care about live-link. I think if the rig makes it over and is functional, it's fine to animate in Unreal.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback and info!

It would be a great feature. The way You can rig in Houdini is way to good not to use it.

I'm doing al anim/mocap work in Houdini and use basic fbx to get the character/anims to unreal.. works great once you've jumped though some hoops.

What might work if you want to animate in UE is to animate the UE default puppet or a metahuman rig and retarget that in UE to your custom character.

Hi. I have no answers but over in the university of Hertfordshire in England I am also thinking of trying to move rigging and anim from maya to houdini for our 3d, games and vfx degrees. I did toy with image output in unreal via usd but have decided to stick with karma for non realtime rendering. Here is what the 3d and vfx students get up to. https://youtu.be/H2dIW5NXwjQ [youtu.be]

Best. Mark