Jump to content

pre-transforms


  

12 members have voted

  1. 1. pre-transforms

    • do you like them
      6
    • do you hate them
      1
    • do they get in the way
      0
    • close but no cigar (there should be a better way)
      3


Recommended Posts

Oddly enough, I haven't had to deal with them a lot. I guess it has a lot to do with how we end up using Houdini here - not a lot of object manipulation; mostly SOPs.

But the future of Houdini involves a LOT of object manipulation and all the tools to deal with many objects like the the multiple-selection parm changes and the Morph tool, drag'n'drop for shaders and such are opening new doors for us. Our Maya::Houdini translation pipeline allows object-per-object scene translation and some of the time its really useful getting in every seperate shape-node from maya into a seperate Houdini object. With these tools (and the pre-transforms) this is now do-able. In the old days, it was a nightmare. Now its managable. Still there are a couple of tools missing, like the equivalent of Maya's "Seperate".

The pre-transforms allow you to emulate the transform node for the pivot point quite effectively, except that you have no way to animate it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

They are really handy if you know they are there.

In addition to what Jason said they are more efficient than slapping down a null and putting the xform there. Plus they allow you to 0 out parameters. Instead of your default elbow rotation being -35,-19,-35 you can dump that value into the pre-xform and make the default 0,0,0.

Its really handy.....

if you know how to use it.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I turn on the global preference "Read-only Pretransforms". Yes Jim it is off the defaults but for Character rigging it works well. :P

This feature allows me to manage where the pretransforms go as there are some operations in Houdini that will build pretransforms for you. Sometimes you want them exposed to see exactly what got changed and by how much. You can still manually build the pretransforms.

For the majority of the work outside of character rigging, you don't have to manage pretransforms nearly as often.

-jeff

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...