Problem with posing characters

[MG]

Whenever I've rigged one of my characters, save my scene and reload it the skeleton seems to always be placed out of position together with my capture.

Does anyone know how I can prevent this from happening?

Thanks in advance!

[anakin78z]

hey,

I've run into this many times myself. It seems that houdini sometimes crews up with the keyframe at frame 0, or somehow that get's moved, screwing up the binding positions.

Thankfully, there's an easy way to fix it. After you've fixed your setup and have everything in place, save out your character geometry. You should save from the capture sop. That will make sure that all the capture data remains. Then load your character back in with a file sop and plug it into the deform sop. Should work swimmingly.

Cheers!

[danteA]

The other thing that used to get me all the time was forgetting to set keys on all my channels at frame 0. So what would happen was that I would key something afterwards which changed the position of my bones at frame 0, thereby screwing up my capture frame. However, the Capture SOP doesn't seem to recook unless its a frame 0. So what happened was that I would merrily animate away not knowing that my capture frame was inadvertently screwed up until I reloaded my scene. However, this seems to be much better since the Capture state at the object level automatically keys all my bone parameters at frame 0 right off the bat saving me the step of forgetting. However, if you have various null object controllers and what not, then you still need to key their parameters at frame 0 if you intend to animate them.

Having said all that, the key is exactly what anakin78z said. DO NOT animate the hip file that you captured with. This was something I've learned the hard way. Let me rehash what he said in a slightly different way.

You don't even need to rig your character. Set up your skeleton, bind it to your geometry, and just use the Pose state to test out your weighting. Once you have that done (or not, don't worry you can go back and change this afterwards), right-click on the input into your Deform SOP and save the geometry out to a bgeo file. This will save out your geometry along with the capture weights. Then start up a new file. In your geo object, put down a file sop and read in the file you saved out earlier. Append to this a deform sop. There you go, now you can go into your skeleton and rig it with all the controls you want as long as you don't rename any bones. Animate with this file. Usually during the process of animating you will encounter some bad weights. You have two choices at this point:

- Edit/Paint the capture weights in the new file. Since these SOPs don't depend on the capture frame, you won't have to worry about having keys at frame 0.

- Edit/Paint/Adjust the capture weights in the original file. Tweak them some more until you're satisfied. Once you're done, re-save out your geometry again. Being the paranoid one, I don't overwrite the old bgeo's. I just increment the number in the filename. In the file you animate with, change your file sop to point to the new bgeo.

The only problem with this scheme is that you pretty much need to make sure that you have your skeleton setup the way you want it first.

Hope that helps.

[MG]

I've already figured it out myself. But anyways, thanks for your help! The geometry exporting trick, however, is new to me.

Again, thanks a lot!