Benny - Rigging in Houdini and Unreal Engine Live Link
Benny is a ghostly blob character I designed and modeled a couple of years ago. I decided to rig him for my final portfolio piece, both to do some rigging, which I find very fun to do, and use Houdini to get better acquainted with the program. For the rigging, I dove into KineFX and APEX, and was delighted to see how procedural and fix-friendly it could be. The main benefit is for sure being able to tweak, repair, and redo the rig, without having several backup skeletons and rigs, and troubleshooting got easier and easier.
I wanted to challenge my perception of Houdini, and learn as much as possible. One of my biggest lessons was that naming things correctly in Houdini is super important, and keeping track of where in the network different attributes and parameters are initiated.
The final Houdini network is quite small, since the entire skeleton base is just points set in the Skeleton node, and then mirrored. After that a long list of attributes is created, where I set the foundation for the controls.
One of the most important things was creating tags for parts fo the skeleton, as these tags let me control what parts of the rig affected what points in the skeleton. It was very fun to figure out how Houdini APEX "thinks" about rigging, as it differs from what I'm used to (Maya).
Visualizing various steps of the process was very rewarding, especially the weight-painting. It felt nice and intuitive to use, and I really like the way Houdini works when it comes to it's tool interface. Toggling betweem various modes and learning the keyboard shortcuts was super fun!
The final step was to get the HDA of the mesh, skeleton and animation to seamlessly transfer to Unreal Engine via Live Link. Using the built-in unreal material node made applying the material a breeze, and posing and moving the model around worked just as I expected.
Overall, this project made me realize that while rigging can be frustrating, it is also something I really enjoy doing, both in Houdini, and Maya. It would be very interesting to figure out a way to transfer rigged skeletal meshes seamlessly between Houdini, Maya and Unreal or Unity. Setting up the controllers in Houdini was way more finicky than I thought, and when things didn't behave in a way I was familiar with, it was at times difficult to figure out exactly where I was making an error.
If I had more time I would definitely test this out on a more complex model, and I wanted Benny's tongue to have physics. The physics would have been implemented via Unreal Engine, but time constraints and having to redo the skeleton and the controls a few times made me reprioritize the Live Link setup.
The controls for the rig was something I struggled with, and in the end I manages to get the left FK controls to work, but not the IK's. So I will for sure make a proper rig with controls when I have the time!
In the future I will for sure create more animations for Benny, give him more physics in both the tongue and the tail, and set up a little blueprint so I can run around with him in a level. When that happens I will udate this portfolio entry - so come back soon!