New to rigging.

I’m working on previz for a short.
I’ve purchased 3 good models on cg trader. They are advertised as fully rigged and they come through fine, I can rig pose them no problem.

Probable is I want to build a flexible and fast IK rig, is there a way to import a purchased model from another dcc and have it come into Houdini with full IK set up and handles?

If not and I have to do the ik myself. Should I use kinefx or Apex. Apex looks a little
Intimidating. Just trying to find the fastest way to get acceptable results for previz.

Thanks for any insights.

The best you can do - and this is true for any dcc - is import the model and the skeleton. Ik setups and rig controls typically cannot be shared between software, unless there's some wizardry involved.

If you're planning on animating this character, use APEX. Kinefx is great for procedural movement, but is clunky and weird for hand animation.

The setup you're looking for is quick to set up, once you know how to do it. Watch this vid I made on how to rig a full biped character from scratch -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv8fVcgKB5o&ab_channel=maxrose [www.youtube.com]

Since you've got the joints already, you can skip to the part where I start the APEX setup.

Thanks for the advice, problem is for me is that I'm not really a seasoned Houdini user so trying to get to an animatable state as fast as possible and there aren't many apex tutorials online. I need my characters to pick up objects. Is that easy with apex?

Also are there any freelancers who might be interested in paid work setting up nice and easy IK setups for me to use?

For the animation part, there is a 15 part workshop for animating characters here that includes files:

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/animation-workshop/ [www.sidefx.com]

Part 8 goes into picking up objects, but if you are a new user, it's probably best to start at the beginning to get an overall understanding for animation using apex rigs

iMO in its current state APEX is overkill for this. For previs it will be much faster and easier to figure out to set up a simple kinefx rig. It won’t be fast but less of a headache than trying to learn APEX in beta. As someone learning APEX in beta.

Honestly I'm still hoping that some good seasoned Houdini rigging masters will create something to help more artists and animation focused people, something like mgear for maya that will give us option to put guides and create rig for us. That can bring us most of the way. That alone would push transition to Houdini for us animators a lot as well.

Despite my comment above, I'm very optimistic about APEX. By dropping down tags and auto-rig component, I can build up a quick, very usable rig in under 15min. It's kind of mind-blowing.

The problem is that it is still in beta and when you need something that the auto-rigs don't give you, there's a steep difficulty curve from laying down auto-rig nodes to doing anything else.

APEX is still missing a lot of tools to make it easier to build the kind of tools you're talking about. But it's a very cool foundation. It needs time to get out of beta and then I think we'll start to see a lot more user-friendly tools. It's a very strong system to build on.