Non Linear Animation

[Dezra]

Hi to everyone.

I am just starting to learn character animation. From what I 've seen houdini's character tools are very powerfull. I have some questions though:

1) Is there a non-linear animation system in Houdini (similar to Maya's Trax editor) ?

2) Can I create a rig for a character , store poses for that rig, and then recall those poses at different frames(maybe from HUD sliders)?

3) Can I mix morph target animation with bone animation for facial rigs?

Sorry if the questions sound stupid but when it comes to character animation I'm a complete "newb" .

[Jason]

Welcome Dezra!

I hope we can answer your questions..

1) Is there a non-linear animation system in Houdini (similar to Maya's Trax editor) ?

It has something incredibly powerful called CHOPs. This allows extremely advanced motion editing and compositing. Its like Trax on steroids - at perhaps the cost of the elemetal interface of Trax. It's more technical but does allow for some really advanced motion editing.

2) Can I create a rig for a character , store poses for that rig, and then recall those poses at different frames(maybe from HUD sliders)?

Do you mean like a snapshot of the pose? No, there is nothing that currently exists to do that, but it is very possible and very easy to take snapshots of channel info and store it for later retrieval - probably a few lines of hscript could get you something going on that.

3) Can I mix morph target animation with bone animation for facial rigs?

Yes, for sure.

Hope this help,

Jason

[Dezra]

Hi Jason and thanks for the answers!

1-> I didn't know that CHOPs is that powerfull.Maybe I have to pay more attention.

2-> So I should basically find a way to record(snapshot) every channel of the rig using HScript?

3-> Cool

Thanks again.

[Jason]

2-> So I should basically find a way to record(snapshot) every channel of the rig using HScript?

14291[/snapback]

Yeah - I really doubt this would be too diffifcult with the help of CHOPs. I'm sure there is more to it that I'm not considering, but my initial thought it that it shouldn't be too hard. Even still, you have to write a usable snapshot system yourself in Maya, don't you? (I know we did)

[Dezra]

Yeah - I really doubt this would be too diffifcult with the help of CHOPs. I'm sure there is more to it that I'm not considering, but my initial thought it that it shouldn't be too hard. Even still, you have to write a usable snapshot system yourself in Maya, don't you? (I know we did)

14294[/snapback]

Hi Jason.

Thank you very much for taking the time to answer my questions. As for Maya I wouldn't know since I'm very new to character animation but I think i'll take your word for it .

This must be one of the nicest ... no make that THE nicest forum I've seen. Going over the posts archives I still haven't found a rude reply even to the most "stupid" questions.Thanks guys, you're the greatest!

[craiglhoffman]

Yes, both the main Houdini forums (the other being www.sidefx.com/forum) are the most professional, courteous, and helpful sites I think you will find on the web. One of the reasons is most of the folks here are long time professionals with little need to berate someone to make their own ego feel better. (Years of production with Directors, Art Directors, and Producers critiquing your work and demanding changes to your masterpiece eventually has the effect of chopping down one's ego...) Another is no matter how good we think we are, there are always new and clever approaches posted on these pages that we all benefit from.

The tight Houdini community has helped us all, and we want to see Houdini survive. We realize that the incredible pace of Houdini development by Side Effects has outstripped the ability of Side Effects to create documents and tutorials to do it justice with Side Effects' meager resources (it is a fairly small company and some of the main tutorial creators have been sucked up by production companies in this recent huge demand for Houdini folks) and we don't mind pitching in to help those people who are willing to give Houdini an honest chance.

-Craig

[birras]

hi, I just jump in here, as this is interesting me a lot.

I looking into houdini because of what I read about the power of setting up custom interfaces without the need of scripting.

now chops is quite powerfull, but can we achieve the giving task of nonlinear blending of different poses?

here is what I have in mind:

a small example:

Ive the following libary of actions:

a) a walkcycle

headturning

c) jump

d) runycle

e) waveing his hands

so I would then have the walkcycle from frame x until y at frame y I blend in the wave action and while its last also the runcycle.

how would I do that and still being able to reuse all poses at any given time, by just copy paste/ or assign action to frames.

if yes, can I achieve that without scripting and/or is there more in depht information about it somewhere on the www?

could you pls point me to it ?

you guys must have found a solution for this, as it is a day to day situation in character animation. how do you organize your pose library in houdini?

are there maybe any sample .hip files out there?

thx

[stevenong]

Hi there,

Yep, there are examples and you can find it here under the "Characters" section. Download the billflip & eggguy .pdf files & the chopsmaterial archive at the bottom. Both archives are the same but download the .zip file to make extracting easier for yourself.

Please go through the tutorials to see how CHOPs work. It will not demonstrate entirely what you're looking for but should demonstrate the flexibility & power of CHOPs. One thing to note is the tutorials are based on Houdini 4.0 so the interface is not the same so please post to the forums if you need help. Or refer to the Help Browser.

Cheers!

steven

[Marc]

Do those files still work? wow... I remember showing those files to the Maya guys and laughing at them, 'cause they couldn't do that... .

Then they laughed right back at me, of course.. because I couldn't rig a character to save my life with Houdini4's character tools.

aah, the good old days.

M

[birras]

MatrixNAN wrote at the sidefx forum:

The old videos are not going to be compatable with the new animation system in houdini 7 so I was wondering when the.....

so I just wanted to double check if the learning material will be completely obsolete and outdated or is it still + or - the same ?

Im running into trouble all the time , that steps shown on tuts are just not doing what they are supposed to do....frankly quite frustrating.

is the info given on these .pdf still valid or shall I wait for updates?

thx

[malexander]

The CHOPs tutorials from 4.0 should still work fine, for the most part. CHOPs hasn't changed all that much since then, so 90% of the CHOPs tutorials should work as advertised. There may be slightly easier ways to do certain things now, though.