Esther Trilsch

The is an unassigned hotkey for that. That means that you just need to go to the hotkey manager and search for 'animate' you will then find the hotkey section for the apexanimate state. There is a hotkey called 'Hide All Controls' all you need to do is to pick a hotkey of your personal preference, assign it the functionality and you are good to go.

check out the spider example in the content library. that showcases a the usage of the rigscript.
https://www.sidefx.com/contentlibrary/spider-rig/ [www.sidefx.com]

The idea of generating components based on 'blueprint' template graphs is on our todo list, but some other features might need to get priority first.

You get already very far though by using the graph::Template node! That can already make your life a lot easier now!
You can copy the important bits from your manually built template graph into the dive target section of the graph::Template node. The output of that graph::Template node is the content of the subnet as a graph itself. now you can add those contents using graph::AddSubnet(yourTemplateGraphResult, 'myFancySubnet') OR simply graph merge to your existing rig. This is a lot easier than recreating the same setup using AddNode, AddNode, connectNode over and over again to replicate the same setup.

The bit that is left is then connect the new nodes or nodes properly in, into your existing graph.

check out the section about Graph templates here:
https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/character/kinefx/apexscriptgraphs.html [www.sidefx.com]

Here we use apex script but the effect is exactly the same whether you do it with the script language or manually with nodes.