Procedural Character Rigging Techniques in APEX | Esther Trilsch | Houdini 20.5 HIVE Paris

Take a deep dive into the process of character rigging in APEX. It will demonstrate workflows using guide skeletons and tags. We will start building rigs with with preshipped tools. Focusing on tool creation we will extend those ones with custom rig components created on the fly using APEX Script.
Esther Trilsch is a Senior Character TD at SideFX. She started her career as a character TD apprentice at Walt Disney Animation Studios working on Zootopia, and worked at RiseFX as a Character Supervisor and Pipeline TD. Combining her focus for both the creative side of anatomy and deformation, as well as the technical side of RnD, she found her sweet spot in the building of innovative structures and tools for character workflows.
00:00 Intro
00:56 Fun with Tags
04:59 Four Characters - One Setup
10:06 APEX Script
22:08 Rigscript Components
28:14 Q&A

[@sanescobar7489]

I love how Houdini evolwes into animation and rigging! Its good direction and it motivates me for learning the best tool out there!

[@philippwelsing9108]

Absolutely fantastic talk, thank you! In fear of rigging im KineFX, but this makes me really want to dive in and learn rigging in APEX. Exciting.

[@sleepingonthecouch95]

This is like a whole new language to me. :))

[@Alexander_Dawn]

SideFX: the spider rig model will be available in the content library for you to play around with. Me who loves rigging but has arachnophobia: 💀💀💀

[@lemmonsinmyeyes]

This is fucking crazy, I love it

[@Handcraftedcc]

Apex script is going to be siiick

[@mohammedahmed4197]

Cool

[@demianpelos]

Rigging became so convoluted... Wow is like a whole new world

[@fastlearner292]

I would disagree with it being convoluted. Rigging *was* convoluted in other apps where sometimes one small mistake means starting over, or random bugs that break project, and anything complex required you to fully delve into complex coding with wierd and slow APIs because so much stuff was hidden into binaries. Sometimes the files get so giant even opening them takes seconds, and the node graph is barely understandable. But with Apex you have none of those problems, literally none. With this you are rather creating a "recipie" for a rig, which you can easily reuse and add functionality to if necessary. With the additions of the inbuild autorig scripts, for half of the simple characters you won't even need to do any added functionality, most of the basic stuff like fk, ik, lookat, spice etc is already there and all you need to do is just prepare the skeleton well and give the correct tags. I have used Apex from the day it was released and it was definitely a better experience. For once I had full control over the rig and it was amazing, even with all it's bugs at that time it was fun to use

[@demianpelos]

@@fastlearner292 what is nice now is you can with nodes and not programming a digital asset of a leg. And cual us it all the time every where.

[@reaktorleak89]

I'm having a tough time understanding how simple APEX is?? I'm rewatching this for sure.

[@simonvandenbroek6384]

I think it's simple as long as you rely on the prebuild functions. then it's extremely simple. it gets much harder than anything you've done before when you build custom stuff. But, as 99% of the characters pretty much use the same rig. you have a humanoid auto-rig to your disposal without any effort. And now it might be much more difficult if you want to build custom stuff. Once you've build it. it's very scalable and the performance is great. So it's possible riggers in future projects will have a very short development cycle, even on projects with many many characters. People not specialized with the tech-part would be able to setup complicated rigs in no-time. And if people on the internet will share their creations. it's possible that rigging can feel like lego.

[@carlosrivadulla8903]

I wish Epic had opted for a syntax like APEX script for Verse code. Once GPT5 or Claude OPUS get trained in that language it ll become the best rigger.

[@StriderSeiryuu]

I'm curious can we use APEX autorig and export it as .FBX to the game engine? or it needs to be animated inside houdini only

[@chr1st0pher]

you can animate in houdini with apex and then export your character + skel anim to an fbx

[@StriderSeiryuu]

@@chr1st0pher That's great. Thank you!

[@raincole]

Does the ik autorig component support IK/FK switch?

[@w.a.l.l.a.c.e.]

One of the example files has an IK\FK switch so I think it will

[@williamharley_]

We have a separate component for that, so yes

[@fourbytes1]

Esther was filling in the code in APEX Script so quickly that I didn't see what, if any, autocompletion was working. Will I have to learn the function names by heart? Since function names are not highlighted here. Now I wonder what's going on with the debugging of the script.

[@EstherTrilsch]

Autocomplete is included in apexscript with a full description of the arguments and their types plus function descriptions.

[@raincole]

It has autocomplete. If you slow the video down you can see it

[@fourbytes1]

@@EstherTrilsch Thanks for the reply! The presentation was great.

[@lveronese]

Please upload the steam engine scene files.. 🙏

[@nicolaastanghe475]

what about limits on rotations. especially limits on rotations that the ik takes into acount. OK i gues the python fixes that. function whould be nice though.

[@EstherTrilsch]

transform limits can be defined with the configure controls node for all controls. The handle and the controls take the limits on interactions into account

[@nicolaastanghe475]

@@EstherTrilsch Thx for the explanation ! great job with the whole thing.

[@a.murphy.appears]

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