I have a procedural object with a varying amount of limbs of varying lengths (see attached caterpillar example).
How can I add a procedural rig with Houdini Engine that will be usable in Unreal Engine (or Unity)?

- This problem has been bugging me for ages. I understand that it would be possible to python script something, but I am pretty sure that Houdini Engine would not fully support that. Furthermore, it should not be difficult to procedurally create some points that have the properties and functionality of bones in realtime. So why not do that? But how exactly can I do that?

The Houdini Engine had better support bone based animation or it is pretty useless as a game support system. Wouldn't you say? So with that in mind lets assume that bones will work. No need to re-invent the wheel.

You can create bone based animations using python but the way it is typically handled is from a set of specifications that are provided by the runtime engine that will finally drive the animation (i.e. Unity, Unreal etc.) So look at those runtime engine specs. You may even find some pre-fabricated rigs that you can just bring into Houdini.

You may want to separate rigging from animation of the rig at the python level. It is probably easier to create the bone rig from the user interface rather than code. But it might be easier to animate your insect legs via python.

Do a search on insect locomotion to get started.
http://www.mindcreators.com/insectlocomotion.htm [mindcreators.com]

Enivob, thank you for the reply, but unfortunately that is not what I am asking.
The animation can be handled in a variety of ways from within the game engine. What I am asking is how to generate different rigs with varying numbers of bones interactively. - All that from within an object node, and without python.
Please open my example file and play with the “segmentAmount” parameter on the caterpillar object node. What I would like to be able to do is to add a bone rig for the whole caterpillar on the fly. A bone rig with bones for the spine and bones for all the legs. But not more bones than needed.

Have you tried putting Bone Link nodes in your Legs subnet? The polywires become the representation of the bone in the viewport.

@Enivob
Sorry for the late reply. I kinda got distracted and let it go for a while…
I did not get those bonelinks to export as actual bones when I exported via FBX, so I guess this would not do what I want. Maybe I did it wrong, though.

Do we have any new tools we could use for this, or can the be bonelink thing be made to work?