Fetching data with CHOPS stops working

[jim c]

I've got a rig set up where I uses various Nulls as controllers to drive bone rotations. Instead of just using a simple expression in the bone's rotation channel to read from the ctrl's rotation, I created a CHOP network and used a Fetch CHOP to grab the r[xyz] channels from the ctrl and then added a Null CHOP as the last node. In the bone I just use an "chop" expression to read the final value from the Null CHOP. The idea is that this lets me easily add other controllers later on. For example, a spine that is made up of six bones, and a six controls for each bone. Plus another master control that that lets you drive all six controls at once.

So this all was working fine on frame 1. Now I get to animating, and key frame one, everything is fine. Go to frame 24, and suddenly things aren't working, when I look at the various chops, I can see that they are NOT picking up the correct values, they are still reading the values from frame 1. The fetch nodes have their Channel Range set to "Use Full Animation Range". If I change this to "Use Current Frame", then the performance of the whole thing drops to total crap, and is unusable (Houdini's Performance monitor flags this CHOP network as being the culprit - I've got around 264 nodes in it).

Any ideas on how to fix this?

[edward]

Did you figure this out? I'm catching up on posts as I've been away. Offhand, your description isn't much to go on. Is it working as desired (except for the slow down) when you do Use Current Frame?

[anim]

if the channels you are fetching are driven by expressions they can have just 1 keyframe so the full animation range can be just first frame

if that's the case(even if not) make sure you specify fetch range manually, you can always set it to scene range ($RFSTART, $RFEND or $FSTART, $FEND)

and of course if specifying in frames set sampling to Frames etc

Edited July 11, 2014 by anim