Character Rigging in Houdini 20.5 | FULL BIPED APEX RIG

[@Animate_MagiCC]

This is such a great tutorial, I always want to add characters to my scenes but then usually get crushed by reality of rigging and animating a character. But this gives me hope.

[@rohandalvi]

I was trying to follow your H20 videos but they changed a lot of stuff in H20.5 and I was really lost. Thank you for the updated video

[@maxrose8845]

Alright Rohan! Thanks man! I’ve been meaning to do this months ago 😬

[@henrythejeditube]

Finally a proper complete start to finish tutorial to explore all these new character tools in Houdini with APEX, so much has changed and so much is confusing, every other tutorial teaching only a certain part but nothing complete, that I have been eagerly waiting for a proper tutorial to cover all the new features, thanks so much for this tutorial, Mr Max

[@maxrose8845]

Wish I could’ve gotten to it sooner - but I’m glad it helped

[@henrythejeditube]

@@maxrose8845 Thank you

[@md310]

@@maxrose8845 Skinning Please =)

[@fraenkfurt]

Dear Max, I can't stress enough how thankful I'm for all your excellent material since it's not only so easy to follow but also super rare in terms of good Houdini rigging tutorials. Let me ask you if there is any resource about on how to make the default ik arms and/or legs stretch-able (where you can pose the knee/elbow in space or at least scale upper and lower leg/arm) with the default setup it's nearly impossible to get smooth knee/elbow-animation without pops which makes it a bit impractical for "real-world-animation-tasks". But again: thank you so so so much, and please keep it up!

[@RickBanks]

The add node is the un-sung hero of Houdini rigging. Great Video Max, picked up a ton of tricks - thank you.

[@maxrose8845]

Don’t sleep on the add / rig doctor node combo! A match made in procedural heaven

[@justinlee1230]

@@maxrose8845 draw curve ftw!

[@fastlearner292]

HOLY MOLY! I just randomly searched for Apex rigs in Houdini and you had uploaded a video damn😂

[@maxrose8845]

🧞‍♂️

[@alecksnichtdabei713]

thanks for your time Max

[@maxrose8845]

You’re welcome!

[@BeakPixel]

Can't believe you put this stuff free here. This is gold grade tutorial material.

[@maxrose8845]

Haha thanks! I figure someone’s gotta get this info out there.

[@johannestiner]

This helped a ton! Thanks for the tutorial 😊

[@watkinscreatives]

At 26:04 when you say "screw the transform driver" my ADHD lit on fire LOL

[@bennyboo82]

Wow this is awesome, thank you so much!! Just for the record, if you made a full apex/kinefx course I would buy it so fast, and I'm sure a ton of other people would too, simply not enough out there for updated and comprehensive houdini rigging/anim training

[@maxrose8845]

lol good to know 💰

[@fcojavier142]

This video is GOLD, thank you for sharing it.

[@maxrose8845]

You’re super welcome

[@williamharley_]

Love it, well done Max.

[@maxrose8845]

Thank you Will! I’m probably going to bombard you with questions sometime soon

[@mgoldfarb]

For the spine @17:00 - joint order is based on VERTEX order, not point order ;)

[@maxrose8845]

Ohh that's huge. Thanks for the clarification

[@richardbridge2046]

Awesome Thanks!

[@maxrose8845]

Don't mention it!

[@carlherner9458]

thanks so much for this!! Would love more apex tutorials since its so hard to learn on your own!

[@MaxCrow]

Ace. There's a quite a few fixes in there that I had got stuck on too, like the hand controllers align and a flipped reverse foot roll. Thanks. (BTW. I had alot of crashes and wierdness with parameters, the suggested fix was to switch from vulcan to openGL in the preferences.)

[@maxrose8845]

Haha you saw me figure those out in realtime!

[@philippwelsing9108]

NICE. Thanks so much for doing this.

[@maxrose8845]

My pleasure, love seeing that it helps others.

[@mikkelmelby]

dope! ty so much for sharing. Skinning tutorial would also be epiic!

[@maxrose8845]

Skinning is a whole other monster, wouldn’t mind a video on that myself

[@Rbwave99]

huge respect 💯❤‍🔥

[@Ignash]

Thank you brother!

[@maxrose8845]

Yeah!

[@trollshavewings4572]

This is great, my one question is how would you set up a way to do ik/fk matching?

[@maxrose8845]

So far I have not figured that out or tried it. Just spit balling, but I think it would involve having a third chain (so you’d have ik, fk, and a match chain), that you could somehow use to match either the fk or the ik, and blend that behind the scenes before you blend your main joint chain.

[@trollshavewings4572]

@@maxrose8845 Im currently trying to implement this for a quadruped rig that i will use for a university project where I will hopefully be creating a black panther leopard and with a muscle sim and groom in houdini. For fun i will also be rigging and animating it in houdini with APEX, from my research a third joint chain could work although would likely not be needed. Ant CGI has a video showing how to achieve this manually in maya. I think for matching FK to IK its pretty simple you would just need to match transformations of the FK Joints to all the IK joints. For matching your IK to your FK it gets a little harder. you would create a duplicate of that pole vector joint to use for the FK to IK match, this joint however would be parented to the mid FK joint, Then with this setup to match all you would need to do is match transformations of the IK tip to the FK tip and match the transformations of the IK polevector to the hidden FK pole vector. Which should result in a perfect match. If i figure this out with a custom apex script component I would be happy to share it, would be incredibly intrested to hear how you do it if you manage to figure it out. Do you have a discord server or some kind of community for APEX rigging? if so id love to join as i truly believe with abit of work in a year or two houdini will fully begin to take over in the rigging and animation space.

[@maxrose8845]

Rigging methods in Maya are generally transferable to APEX, so whatever Antcg’s solution is would most likely work. I’m part of a few Houdini discord groups, but so far no APEX dedicated severs since it’s still pretty niche. Not to say it won’t blow everything else out of the water in a couple of years

[@trollshavewings4572]

@@maxrose8845 kzbin.info/www/bejne/bYPCYaKjfL5gg9U here is ant cgis video explaining how to match the ik and fk, I just cannot figure out how to achieve this in apex. been stuck on it for the last few hours. Seems like it should be simple but i just do not understand the network view for apex script and how that all seems to work, i only understand the workflow like you showed in your video where you use the built in autorig components. would really appreciate if you could take a look into how to achieve this functionality in APEX as your videos are literally some of the best APEX tutorials currently out!

[@trollshavewings4572]

​@@maxrose8845 kzbin.info/www/bejne/rnarY59topioftU Here is ant cgi's video im talking about, explains exactly what would need to happen to match the two. I just feel completely lost trying to implement it in APEX; I just don’t have enough understanding of the network view and what’s happening behind the scenes with the autorig components. I would absolutely love to see a breakdown video like you did for the reverse foot setup but for an ik/fk match if your up for the challenge! I believe it would be a useful and interesting tutorial, especially for those trying to understand how to set up their own components in APEX! Regardless, I want to express my gratitude for your robot tutorials and this one. They are some of the only beginner-friendly resources available on KZbin, and they’ve really helped me learn the basics of how rigging works in APEX - I'm comitted to learning as much as i can on this area and would like to build a deeper understanding of not just how but why each of the autorig components work to further improve my skillset, and i cannot wait to see where sideFX takes this stuff as its super intresting!

[@FancyFun3433]

my god this is so complex i love it.... id love to learn this software but i just dont have time!!

[@maxrose8845]

Learn it just one bit at a time, it’s not as complex as you think it is. Once you learn it, you won’t be able to use anything else

[@LintonNkambule]

Just in time I need to rig a character on Monday next week.

[@maxrose8845]

Better get to it!

[@abecoyne6302]

I have been checking your channel most days hoping for an upload! Great vid, I’ve been really struggling implementing multiple geo blend shapes into one abstract controls using X and Y position. Tried to use the Chicken and Luchador example file to figure it out but with no luck. Is there anyway of modifying the blend shape Autorig components for something like this or can this only be done by creating your own component script? Thanks !

[@maxrose8845]

With the supplied auto rig components I cannot think of a way to do this. I’ve done this before, but using a component script. I wouldn’t suggest modifying the blendshape auto rig component - the idea would be to use the auto rig component to create the initial setup, then make a separate component script to add an abstract control and make the connections there.

[@abecoyne6302]

Thanks for the help, I’ll give that a try.

[@tulypo]

THank you very much!!!!!

[@maxrose8845]

You are very welcome 🤗

[@rd-cv4vm]

for the parameter box, if you try to resize it from the bottom it snaps back in

nice video, thank you for sharing, why both yellow boxes shape stay right at the center axes ( x=0) for the ik_polevec? In you video at 10:25 they are align in front of the knees..I used the polvecoffset to align them..but it is not working properly, do you have any solution?

[@maxrose8845]

Double check to make sure you are tagging everything correctly. Check your control list, if you’re getting way to many controls with odd names that typically means the ik isn’t being created. If the right controls are being created, then make sure there’s a slight bend in the joints that point in the direction of where you want your pole vector to be

@@maxrose8845 I tried to post a link with a youtube video to show you how it goes, but youtube has deleted 3 time the message... I belevied it is not perfect, it is on my channel

@@maxrose8845 kzbin.info/www/bejne/h4PLi6OlirKZbNU I hope the link will be not deleted

[@rafaelgarbinart9708]

Hello, thanks for the video, one question, if I wanted to control several joints like a rope with the spline component, could I use a tag with * in segments? thanks

[@maxrose8845]

you mean automatically rig multiple chains similar to the multiik setup? Yes, you can do that. You just need to make sure that each segment has a unique string along with the common string (chain_a, chain_b, chain_c), and within segments you'd put in chain*

[@reasonsreasonably]

FYI, I'm not getting the issue with having to click [ENTER] key to have the tag stay labelled. You can click in the viewport and the names will stay. At least in daily build 20.5.393.

[@GraphicArt-cy7nr]

Thats Great. want to see facial rig and animation

[@manisandhu3370]

Hey man great stuff. When I change 'root parent' to cog in Spine Parents, my rig collapses down to the origin. I did draw my spine with skeleton sop. Would this make a difference?

[@xAlixxAlix]

21:00 minute in the spine what were you doing at that moment didn't work out for me like in the lesson???

[@maxrose8845]

Double check to make sure your tags are correct

[@md310]

@@maxrose8845 I needed to make my spine value in the attribute adjust lower case (the one with all the points) then it worked .. until then the controls were all over the place.

[@justinlee1230]

i suggest naming the tags in separate nodes, the reverse foot step bother me for an hour, and finally i rename all the tags once more, the error gone..... and dont know why, "L_foot" and "L_Foot" also give different results....

[@maxrose8845]

That’s a good idea for debugging your tags - break it down into smaller chunks to see why it isn’t working

[@SoJahSeh91]

Would absolutely love a facial rig tutorial if you have the time/mental space

[@maxrose8845]

Mental space, totally. Time? Not so much

[@SoJahSeh91]

@@maxrose8845 When setting up the COG control, in the video text you mentioned that you have to set the Driverparent to get it to snap to spine_0. Which one and is this lieu of doing the component script?

[@Heffects]

can this be used to follow along to rig the robot or do you plan on releasing updated version for it?

[@Psevdo_Horek]

спасибо большое .почти всё понял

[@maxrose8845]

Fantastic! That’s what I was going for!

[@Psevdo_Horek]

@@maxrose8845 when doing the fingers you need to use a rigdoctor. and add after the skeleton. make another skeleton and connect everything in it. then it works immediately.

[@Psevdo_Horek]

@@maxrose8845 when doing the fingers you need to use a rigdoctor. and add after the skeleton. make another skeleton and connect everything in it. then it works immediately.

[@Trogleth]

Any chance this works with Mocap like a Rokoko suit?

[@siddarthrock]

thank you so much!

[@maxrose8845]

You’re welcome!! ☺️

[@sho0n275]

Would it be possible to drive a blendshape based on the rotation/angle of the bones? I'm able to do a corrective blendshape using the Rig Pose node but Apex script proved to be much harder than I thought.

[@maxrose8845]

Yes you can do that, it's certainly possible. I personally would do it in a component script, but obviously I can't fit the explanation into a single comment. I'll try to get around making a video of that someday.

[@hanheecho6437]

How could I get the same female obj? I really want to follow you exact the same way.

[@maxrose8845]

It’s a model from DAZ 3D, which is a free software. I’d’ suggest downloading it, I use it all the time

[@hanheecho6437]

@@maxrose8845 Oh, I already have it, thanks millions pal! I really needed this tutorial! God bless you

[@ashrafmajdee]

shouldn't it be spine instead of spline in autorig component ?

[@maxrose8845]

There's another component called spine, but that's from the previous version. The 'spline' component can be used for a spine or a tail, for example

[@ChRW123]

10:15 "Magically, everything works." uhm... I must have done something wrong. It does not build a rig...

[@ChRW123]

Ah, it was a scale issue. My model was just too big, so the controls were barely visible. lol

[@VishnuSuresh-ud9ry]

Can u do a robotic character with working pistons

[@maxrose8845]

That's quite the request! Maybe just a piston?

[@VishnuSuresh-ud9ry]

@@maxrose8845 or maybe thats it...

[@VishnuSuresh-ud9ry]

@@maxrose8845 or just show us what are the constraints in apex

[@edh615]

The sekeleton building part gave me a headache

[@maxrose8845]

lol really?? That’s my favorite part!

[@carlosrivadulla8903]

at this point, if sidefx doesn't have an one click rig is bc they won't

[@maxrose8845]

That’s the point - once you’ve built this rig, you’ll have just built your one click rig!

[@YanivGorali]

Thank you very much!

[@maxrose8845]

You’re very welcome ⭐️