Skin Editing

[McNistor]

Hey folks

I'm investigating something that would help in my new venture of specializing on character work and I've realized that posing tools in Zb are not quite as good for me as I was hoping.

So now I have the choice to scrape another layer off Softimage usage and possibly use Houdini for posing base meshes.

So far I've not been able to find in Houdini the tool equivalents in XSI I regularly use and frankly couldn't do without. The main problem I'm facing is that I can't seem to figure out how to edit point weights, per bone, manually, aka numeric input. I've attached an image from XSI's skin editor where you'll see 4 points selected in viewport and one point to be edited in the editor with the bone1 as the influencing one also activated (bone1, bold text).

Houdini Geometry Spreadsheet seems to only display those values, no editing.

Am I missing something?

Edited May 6, 2016 by McNistor

[michael]

 capture your geometry

then at the object level

TAB > Edit Capture Weights

select some points > at the TOP of the view port you'l see a button that says "Spreadsheet"

[McNistor]

Oh, thanks for the quick reply.

As someone that likes to know, at least at a superficial level, what's going on in my scene, I noticed that a captureoverride node was created inside. Now, I was expecting that selecting that node would provide me with the Spreadsheet button. Not only does that button lacks in that node, but it seems that the tool works only at scene level and it disappears as soon as you dive into a SOP. Is clicking the toolbar Edit Capture Weights the only way to access that spreadsheet?

This is a bit confusing, but more important than that (confusion can be easily lifted after a period of getting used to) is that being unable to work at SOP level denies the user the chance of using the selection methods already available (rings, loops, selecting polygon regions and converting the selection to points, etc.)

In Softimage one has to simply go in point mode and select a few, via any selection method/trick, open the Weights Editor and if the geometry has any ops associated with weight editing, editable values are displayed.

 Hopefully something can be done about this in a future version of Houdini. Until then, I'll stay with Softimage for this too.

Edited May 6, 2016 by McNistor

[michael]

this is a current RFE (I can't find the number at the moment) and something that we'd like to improve.

[McNistor]

That's very good to hear. Here's to seeing those improvements soon.