Animation tools Question

[infinity_spiral]

Hi Guys,

How in Houdini we can reduce the keys on baked animation and preserve the shape on the curves.I couldn't find anything like that in the channel editor.Is there a simple way to do that?In Softimage this is called Fit curves and in SI2013 autodesk changed to Simplify curve.

Another question. Is there anything close to animation layering in Houdini?I tried takes and chops but is just not the same and doesn't really work if you want to animate with layers...For example how would go and tweak baked motion capture data animation on character.I will be happy to hear for some workarounds.

I am Softimage user and lately I am trying to stay away from autodesk ...I really like Houdini and hope that we can adopt it to our studio as a main tool, but I suspect that I will have many questions and I hope this is not bothering you.

Thanks for your help!

[edward]

The chrefit hscript command will reduce the keys. In CHOPs, I think there's the Fit CHOP or similar.

Not sure I understand your second question.

[infinity_spiral]

Thanks a lot!I will take a look at it.

My second question was if there is something close in Houdini to the animation layers in Maya and XSI.In CHOPS as I understand , you have to export each animation to a clip and than blend them as a separate layers.

Can you for example have underlying animation inside the CHOPS as a clip, and on a top of it to add extra animation in channel editor?If this possible than we have something closer to the animation layers in XSI.

And with Takes as I understand , you can add extra keys of animation for each take, but you still working on the same xyz channels. So you are not adding more channels with animation but just more keys in the same xyz channel.

Thanks for your help!

[edward]

I'm sure it's not exactly like Softimage. However, if you want to set keys in CHOPs, the idea is to use the Channel CHOP, which is the node that is created when you create clips.