TomMan

I'm just starting experimenting and since my experience with rigging is pretty low, I would like to make this project as public as possible. So anyone who likes to participate, welcome on board.

I guess the most difficult part is probably the wing, apart from achieving a rig which is convenient to animate.

Right now I stumble across two things mainly.

a) My current dummy feathers use curve points as origins. The curve is “attached” to the bones in a rather clumsy way. As soon as a bone changes its geometry there'll be errors since I import the bones by an OBJECT_MERGE and delete all points except the one I would like to constrain the curve to.

Is there an easier way to do this? In SI I would have thrown all the bones into a group and the get all position values and bone length values in the group to calculate the root and tip positions. Is there a way to do this in H? Or how would you constrain a curve to bones? If the curve consists just out of a few points it can be done manually, but if the curve got loads of points my method is definitely not convenient.


B) I checked a video in which somebody demonstrates a bird wing. It seems that the elbow joint doesn't work like in my rigging example (rotating in just one plane), but the the ulna/radius rotate around their length at around 90° if the elbow is rotated by 180°. Imagine a door fully opened (180° till it's closed) with just one joint in the middle. If you close the door it starts to rotate also around the joint in such a fashion that the door is in the same plane as the ground when it's totally closed.

Do I need to add another bone on top of the ulna/radius which rotates around this axis or can I rotate the bone by itself? Since it's an IK chain the manually entered rotation values don't have an effect (How can I display the rotation values of the bones? In their node panel there doesn't seem to be a settings which displays it).


Next steps would be to come up with a tendon which connects the wrist and shoulder, find the correct way to apply the feathers (does one need bones?) and shape the primary and secondary feather according to the wing shape.

So any help and participation is welcome.


Cheers
Tom

P.S.: Boneangle() works great to get the angle between two bones. Isn't there a Boneposition(), Bonerotation() and Bonelength() syntax???

Since my experience with H16 so far is horrible in terms of usability (lags), I'd like to get some input on how to solve these issues. Starting H16 and trying to use the top menu already gives me the impression, that something is totally wrong. The menus don't highlight immediately, nor do the “realize” that the cursor is already above another menu.

The lagginess is although present in the node editor. Trying to choose a node or even get the node menu (tab) takes extra time.

I'm running windows 7, no PC is connected to the web. GPU drivers are up to date. In case I need any additional tools, please tell me which and where I find them.

P.S.: What is the Qt4 version for of H16? Is this the one to prefer? Or the one without the Qt4 support?

Cheers
Tom

This thread is about two years old. “unfortunately” I need to create a flag on my own. I just did the Maya tutorial and I love the results. Since I don't want to use Maya and stick with Houdini's procedural approach, how can this be done?

I looked at the examples here, but can't say that I'm impressed. I played for about 3-4h with the cloth solver in H. It's simply a pain and looks horrible.

Some guys add odforum gave me some tips to use grain sheets, but now my flag just bounces like a piece of rubber, even worse than before. O.k.; I'm new to H, but well used to use ICE. So I guess there seems to be some mystery.

I attached both my scenes. But getting close to the Maya example, impossible. Maya simulates with around 8fps, H with 0.5-1.0fps. That's painful. Can't believe that this is still tricky to do, since the results look like the one's I got from Lightwave a decade before.

Any help is welcome!

Cheers
Tom