A few Rigging and Simulation related questions

[Ramteen]

Hello folks

I'm on my journey of switching from Maya to Houdini as a character rigging animation artist. I'v found it very facinating so far.

I hope with your help I can find workout a few problems which I need to deal with at the moment.

1. Is there a way in houdini to tranform an object using 3 vectors at scene level (not at SOP level using Vex, Etc...)

2. Is there a way to control the effect of a Finite Element simulation by a weight map so the geometry stays intact in some parts?

3. How can I make a cloth simulation stick and slide on a colider so to be used as realistic skin effect?

Any hints or tips or alternatives whould be greatly appreciated.

Cheers
-Ramteen

[jujoje]

Not sure about 1, but on the FEM front:

2. There are a few attributes to control FEM; the relevent ones for making it follow an animation are tagetP, targetv, targetstiffness and targetdamping. There is also pintoanimation, which would be the logical choice, but from what I hear it's giving some weird results at the moment, so I'd try the target attributes first. For a list of all the attributes check out this page in the docs: http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/nodes/dop/finiteelementsolver

3. I'm thinking that some combination of targeting the skin to the collision geometry might work. From my doomed attempt to create a FEM muscle system I discovered that the soft body constraint is broken with FEM (or was last time I checked), which is kinda annoying as that would have been the obvious choice. 

That said FEM appears to be both a lot more stable and faster these days, so could prove really powerful for rigging. Just wish I had more time to look into it myself at the moment. Be curious to hear how you go!