Michael Goldfarb

yes, I did say that didn't I?

we could have invented some sort of custom format to store the rig, but the skeletal geometry is right there so why not
it's just a quirk that you can then load this geometry and view it - makes for some fun tricks!

try to fill some of those holes first, use polyFill etc

and I think the mesh needs to be reversed also

HTH

yes, I go through it in the tutorial

but the main difference is that jointcapturebiharmonic:
does a bunch of stuff that you don't know about and don't have much control over (and I'd argue don't need)
hides everything from you - so you don't know what is going on, and can't figure out how to fix something if it doesn't give the results you expect.

the biharmonic capture in Houdini is the best that I've ever used, and with some planning, breaking up your mesh into logical pieces, using different resolution tet meshes (see the tutorial) etc will give you the best results