Coping geometry

[thrasherstudios77]

I have been using the xform SOP to make copies of birds claws, basically because I can make a copy of a claw and move it at the same time. I was wondering if this is a good way of duplicating geometry. Am I going to have any problems with skinning or rigging using the xform SOP. I guess if I just save the whole network of SOPS out as a .bgeo format it wouldn't matter, but does anyone see problems with using xform SOP in this way.

Thanx in advance

[Marc]

no sir.

carry on.

Marc

[thrasherstudios77]

Right on

Thanks Mark

BTW do you know if Side Effects is going to come out with any vids on Skinning characters, and advanced rigging, and advanced CHOPs, and advanced UV texturing and.... We could all us some more help with learning this very deep and methodically app I think.

Oh, Oh and considering Houdini is the top dog for effects, it would be great if they could do a vid that takes a Hollywood effect apart and that will truely show why Houdini is such a bad ass, not that I need any more convinving but you know what I mean.

I only ask because I saw that you are a admin for this forum, maybe you have the inside track

Mahalo

[edward]

Have you done all the ones on the second apprentice CD? Have you done these yet?

http://www.vislab.usyd.edu.au/sidefx/houdi...ters/index.html

[thrasherstudios77]

thank you Edward

Yeh I somehow missed the one on binding surfaces to bones, seen all the other ones though. That vid is a good intro to binding models, hopefully Side effects will release a more advanced tutorial on creating skin deformers, or in Maya they are called Flexors or influence objects. Does Houini have rigid and smooth skinning capabilities? I read on a post that metaballs can be used as skin deformers, not sure how though, but this would be alot like Flexors and influence objects in Maya.

[edward]

In Houdini, you have one "capture world" so to speak that gives you everything. When you capture, each point has a list of bones which it is influenced by and and weight for each bone that says how much the point is affected by that bone. Typically, the weights for a point are normalized so that they always sum to 1.

It's up to the artist to decide how they want to initially create these weights. Houdini offers two methods: Regions and Proximity. After that, you can choose to mix and match how you want to edit the weights using either Edit Capture Weights (bone sliders weighting or numeric spreadsheet) or Paint Capture Weights. If you want to keep everything fully procedural so that you can alter the topology of the geometry at any time before you capture though, you should stick to using Regions and Edit Capture Regions.

[thrasherstudios77]

Thank you Edward

That sounds alot like Maya's way of doing it, maybe I can figure it out without the need of a tut.

later

[edward]

I don't think you can capture with capture regions in Maya though. So if you want to add more detail in your geometry without affecting your captures, that would be pretty hard. Although it's another art on its own on how to do effective captures using capture regions alone. (hint: use lots of them )

Capture regions if you key their initial values at frame 0, (see the Capture parameters tab of the Bone object), you can then animate their shape over time to act like deformers. When you're in the Edit Capture Regions tool, click on the question mark near the upper-left corner of the viewport.

For metaball deformation, read the help on the Bulge SOP.