Hi,

Since it is still in beta and the lack of documentation and tutorials online, I'm trying to find my way around the new APEX rigging and animation workflow. In the past I used chops to do animation layering and other useful processes like secondary animation, but I haven't been able to find a way to do this with APEX.

As a workaround I should probably try to extract the skeleton, operate on it as I would in the past then put back the transforms into apex but I was wondering if the animation channels are accessible directly from APEX.

If anyone has useful information on animation layering and somehow leveraging chops with APEX, I would greatly appreciate your insight.

Thanks

/Yaniv

I don't think there is an easy way to do it.

I was wondering if the animation channels are accessible directly from APEX

Well, yes: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/hom/hou/ChannelPrim.html [www.sidefx.com]

You could unpack the output from two APEX Animate nodes, extract their channel prims and blend them yourself. The workflow seems quite tedious to me tho.

Thanks raincole,
I'll look into that as well. What I meant was if there is a way to access the Apex animation channels directly from chops like you would with parameters in the old workflow.

At the moment I am trying to blend 2 animate nodes by extracting the skeleton with the animation from each (using scene invoke, haven't found another way to do it yet that includes the entire rig with the animation) and skeleton blending them with the rig I've extracted from Control Extract then pushing it back with Control Update Parms but it's missing some of the animation, particularly anything that isn't animated on the skeleton.
I'm probably doing this wrong so I welcome any insight at this stage. Getting the entire rig with the animation would probably make this whole process easier and similar to using the kinefx workflow tools along APEX.

Thanks

YanivG
At the moment I am trying to blend 2 animate nodes by extracting the skeleton with the animation from each (using scene invoke, haven't found another way to do it yet that includes the entire rig with the animation) and skeleton blending them with the rig I've extracted from Control Extract then pushing it back with Control Update Parms but it's missing some of the animation, particularly anything that isn't animated on the skeleton.
I'm probably doing this wrong so I welcome any insight at this stage. Getting the entire rig with the animation would probably make this whole process easier and similar to using the kinefx workflow tools along APEX.

Hey! Have you managed any progress on this one? Im trying the same, but I cant even blend the extracted skeletons... :S

Blending extracted skeletons should work. Use APEX Scene Invoke, output the Base.skel geometry from it. Make sure your rig outputs Base.skel of course. The more difficult problem is pushing the skeleton animation back onto the rig controllers because that requires a) your rig is invertible, and b) the rig controllers are then retargeted to the skeleton animation.

EDIT: Attached hip file for skel blending