Houdini KineFX 101: Rigging From Scratch, Binding Skin to bones, Simple Constraints

[@greccovarella9711]

You've convinced me to switch my rigging from maya to houdini w/ these great tutorials!!

[@spikearo]

It's always good to see people share knowledge about Kinfx, Thanks!

[@parkercoleman8078]

Harold more coming!!

[@siegmattelvisuals6160]

Man I cannot even begin to tell you how grateful I am for this tutorial. The AutoRig was really getting on my nerves and not working as I expected -- walking through each step of this has been super, super helpful in demonstrating how rigging works in 18.5 for someone like me who has no prior 3d rigging experience.

[@nathanbayne3576]

I second this, I didn't realize how you could even start deforming with such a simple setup. It works really well honestly.

[@YamahaMaaaan]

The amount of questions solved is huge.Thank you mate sincerely.

[@remedyrenders5746]

Explained really well and w effort! Thank you! i have now officially switched from the scuffy c4d skinning tools to Houdini.

[@TakeLerr5]

This just opens a whole another world inside Houdini for me, Im very much thankful for your patience and well explained step by step intro to KineFX!

[@XianJaxxon]

Brilliant as succinct, Dude! Great work (As always)!

[@ludwigek835]

Wow, amazing tutorial! I feel that rigging tutorials in general are too long with to hours of material. But most of the time you just want something plain and simple like this, very good! I also gave a good laugh about tetz ;)

[@Josh_Foster]

Thanks Parker! Very helpful

[@richn2497]

Thanks Parker, this is really nicely explained. Cheers muchly

[@Stylish_suricat]

I can’t figure out how to make the kinefx character sit down. do you have a video about this?

[@graemepalmer2306]

Great tutorial, Thanks! - I was wondering though, how did you get the weights to display as colours at 21:45 please? - I only see my wireframe as white. Thanks again!

[@michaelgoni4179]

me too.. any help?

[@CGI-Space]

@@michaelgoni4179 You need to enable the icon that looks like the Google Map icon - not sure what it is called. If you look at the bottom right corner of the display viewport, where it says 69FPS, just slightly above that.

[@thevonmunchies9213]

Thank you... I learnt so much from this!

[@parkercoleman8078]

Thanks! Love to hear it!

[@gt_kenny]

Love your channel dude! Liked and subbed. Keep up the good work! Oh, and don't worry about tetrahydzralaz.. tertahizdrda... teztadihrlaliza... that thing! ;)

[@BEl07siempre]

Very helpful man, great tutorial, thanks a lot.

[@kextnext]

“I don’t like that skin texture looking at me” LMAOOOO SAME

[@cadudatoros]

Amazing tut , thank you soo much

[@rattlesnake3d]

great tutorial man! thank you

[@NathanApffel]

you rock! thanks buddy.

[@Square-zero-one]

Super useful Thank you

[@ud3180]

Thank you for the tutorial. Please can you do a in-depth tutorial as well that would be great

[@zachb.4429]

I am a little confused. How do you get the capture layer paint tool to work on the posed figure rather than the rest position?

[@emepicuta3899]

awesome tutorial! Thanks for your content. Is there a way to modify an inner bone alone? without modifying the bones connected to it afterwards? It is a bit unhandy when maybe you have your pose right except for your shoulder but changing the shoulder changes the arm, hand and fingers connected to it, where I only want to change the shoulder bone... is there a way to do this? Thanks again

[@sarayutthomard839]

Thanks for sharing Parker!! Do you know how much these rigging tools have been using in the industry and is that possible to pass the rig to Maya to be animated?

[@sams_3d_stuff]

T H A N K S a bunch!!

[@niteshsharma2150]

enjoyed "tetrahedralization"

[@mz4441]

thx for this tut. I have 2 questions. .. can I orient the joints? (bones?) and how can I move the spine exact to Zero X ?

[@mokoemm]

Outstanding work. Super handy tutorials, direct on point. Exactly what I was looking for in my search to learn more about KineFX! I owe you a beer! (and a Subscription on your Patreon acc!)

[@parkercoleman8078]

Bless your soul! Hopefully getting out a new patreon only content video today! Glad I could be of help!!

[@peteroffline6616]

how do you export this as an fbx?

[@Pcdrom]

Thanks for this tutorial. Managed to get my creature mostly working for the UE. One thing though as I'm new to rigging concepts and stuff, but I thought there would be a kinda "root" controller, in order to move the entire rig/character itself. What would be the approach for this one using KineFx? Should it be an extra controller parented to all the other?

[@phinnaeusoconnor]

Great tutorial, very helpful, How do I re-orient a joint axis like you can in Maya?

[@parkercoleman8078]

No maya experience but you can re orient joints to their child’s or just re orient joints in general by using a rig doctor node!

[@theodoredaley2229]

Really amazing and helps a lot! I was wondering though is there a way to take an alembic baked animated character and reverse engineer a rig from that animation (since it has no joints or anything) to then use in Kine FX (either on a new character or so then can use the rig to have feet planting work)?

[@parkercoleman8078]

Thanks for the kind words! But to answer your question, alembic will not carry any joint or rig weighting attributes with it and will essentially just be a deforming mesh. Howeverrrr if you wanna get crude with it and really dive in and embrace the reverse engineering side of things, if the mesh has constant topology (the same point count throughout the animation) you could use a blast node to isolate points on the surface of the mesh that are close enough to their retrospective joints (foot, knee, hip, etc..) and then reparent them and bind the mesh on frame one. Again I’m sure this will have some issues you’ll have to troubleshoot but with a little love I think you could make it happen in KineFx

[@ВасилийБабич-ъ8т]

For simple examples, this always works, but try to assign weights to a complex character with different details and you will find that it is almost impossible.

[@brandoncyoung]

press P when you have a point selected to set its translation, to zero it out

[@VlatkoDojchinoski]

Thanks for the tutorial! I did everything for my character, but my question is: is it possible to export ( and how ), for game engine? When I am doing fbx export its exporting only the mesh, the same is happening when I am exporting in blender. Can I have like a proper skeletal mesh outside of houdini? Thanks

[@parkercoleman8078]

Have not first hand imported KineFX rigs out to any game engines yet but have done animation work for other people using game engines with no issues! Try using the FBX character export and plug in the rest mesh as the first input, rest skeleton as 2nd input and animated skeleton as the 3rd input. Don’t make the mistake of using the bone deforms output as your rest mesh!

[@mitch9244]

Hey man, great tutorial! I was hoping you might be able to assist me in exporting this? I'm trying to get it into unreal! Can't quite seem to get the fbx to export properly and have unreal read the skeleton properly :/ Thanks man!

[@parkercoleman8078]

Mitch I will look into this this coming week! Definitely know my way around unreal but haven’t used it much in the last half year so I’ll have to see how well KineFX works with it!

[@mitch9244]

@@parkercoleman8078 Thanks so much parker! I think I may have found something - by using rigdoctor on skeleton, and using the "name" sop on skin geo, I've been able to import it into unreal without too many hiccups. The animation seems to work about half the time, due to probably Unreal interpreting it weirdly in some cases. I think Unreal confuses the "root" bone in some cases... I was creating a rig from scratch, had animation on my "root" bone and that might have been my issue.

[@jonathanmcfall4814]

can you rig a hard surface object this way also? like a Mech? Are the any settings to remove derformation?

[@parkercoleman8078]

Sorry for the late reply! For hard surface stuff I would advise using the capture packed primitive method, you can set the rig up exactly as I do here but you when your ready to bind it to the skin you would use the capture packed primitive node instead and isolate each solid piece and link them to the corresponding joint! I have a tutorial on the capture packed primitive node but it’s geared toward attaching a solid object to the rig (in my example I use this man holding a gun) but the same principles would apply to a robotic mesh!

[@jonathanmcfall4814]

Excellent. Thank you. Will give that a go.

[@ssemukuyetimothy137]

any way to capture facial rig like eyes

[@smyrkphace]

I dont know if its your magic touch but when I try to rig the fingers its placing the bones aaaaallll over the place hahaha! I try to tweak them back inside and it seems to try to rotate them on the wrong plane. houdini hates me I swear. When I rotate the finger the whole hand wants to rotate.

[@smyrkphace]

took the merge off worked fine after that.

[@Anymuster]

Чел, у тебя такой голос будто ты вот вот собрался плакать или захныкать. Побольше бодрости ))

[@bUildYT]

:O

[@wernerziemerink]

Thanks. Great video. Now if only Sidefx can come up with better Animation tools.

[@DevGods]

What’s missing?

[@parkercoleman8078]

Dev Gods my only complaint is they don’t seem to have the 3D motion path tool at the sop level yet! Other then that they actually have some pretty great stuff, just gotta dig a little bit to find it sadly

[@DevGods]

@@parkercoleman8078 yea after messing around with it a bit I found a couple things missing as well. The graph editor is nice, channel groups and built in animation layers. But I couldn’t for the life of me find a way to emulate blenders action editor and Non Linear Action editor. For character animation something like this is a must.. Also noticed a lot of rigging tools missing after rigging in packages like Maya and blender.. can’t wait until they take KineFX to the next level so I can do all of my work in one package

[@MasterShubhamC]

24:21 Gigachad

[@uahoeandabeeetch]

Thanks for explaining this dude. This is beyond complicated. As everything else in Houdini. They always find the most convoluted way to do everything in SideFx. How can't they make a preset for this, I mean it's a mess of nodes, I really hope they make this into an automated thing since that's the only selling point of Houdini, everything should be easily made into a preset. I hope in version 19 we don't have to deal with this mess anymore just throw this shit into HDA.

[@parkercoleman8078]

This is pretty simple in terms of a rigging process... if you want an easy “preset” there is a auto rig tool built into Houdini

[@parkercoleman8078]

Rigging is not something you can often just slap a preset onto and often requires a level of detail and care. You have many different shapes of characters and creatures with varying bone structures and amount of bones, it is very difficult to make this into an automated process. If you attempt rigging in any 3D software you are going to run into a lot of this kind of setup. There will be a hierarchy with constraints and controls you will have to set up. The end goal of this is to put this setup into an HDA that will get controlled by one node but it is not an automated process. There is a reason why professional rigging is an entire career path in itself.

[@intothevoid2046]

for a simple rig like this this seems to be an awfully tedious procedure.

[@aeko]

Needs more explanation about WHY you're using specific nodes. Just saying 'I like this one better' isn't teaching me anything.

[@aeko]

"So, uh, if I want to move stuff around and um, like, let me go ahead and um, put this over here and then um, maybe move this." I can't remember the last time I heard so much vague, undescriptive language in a tutorial.

[@nathanbayne3576]

A lot of Houdini is trying something yourself and deciding what's the best node to use for YOUR scene, theres only so much you can say about each node or you're gonna be watching a 6 and a half hour tutorial. There's so much to learn here and it's honestly one of the best kinefx tutorials on the internet right now.

[@parkercoleman8078]

If you want a more in depth explanation I have a series on my Patreon where I rig a trex from scratch over the course of several hours. I did not want this video to be that long. This is, as said at the start a “quick and dirty” rig. This is also one of the last videos in the KineFX101 series, if you had watched the ones prior to this I have gone over what most of these nodes do and there is no need for me to repeat myself continuously. These videos take time for me to do, and since I work as a freelance artist I typically do not have time to write out scripts for my videos, I try my best to edit them up in post to avoid dead space but it isn’t exactly easy to speak flawlessly for 45 minutes straight without a script.

[@ertelemetnely]

super useful, thank u