Well I’ve finally banged out a functional rig + deformers in houdini. The first thing I wanted to test out is the object mesh as bones display idea. So here’s a video of me playing with it with completely default weighting.

Obviously there are a few problems, such as missing faces, default weighting, etc. Everything I mouse over and highlights is a control, so the logical place to animate those leg pockets is obviously to click whatever gets highlighted on the pockets themselves. However there are other areas I want to address:

Colour is obviously going to be an important feature. Red, Green and Yellow for left right and middle. But then there should also be Red for “not in use” (such as a leg bone while in FK mode) for quick feedback on what controls can’t be used.

Looking into other display modes for pre/selection highlighting. Wireframe is an ugly and boldly intrusive way of showing that you’ve got something selected. I’m not sure how I can change this though. Maybe openGL shaders? Begging sideFX?

I will also have to change what faces some groups occupy. As you can see, some controls such as explicit knee control is hard to grab when you’re zoomed out a bit, also some floating polygons is just a bad idea for accidental selections, like on the main hip control.

I like the way I can propagate the subdivision of the mesh down onto the display as well. What you’re seeing in this video are directly bones. This won’t be rendered, but it can be nice to see a smoothed version of the mesh for when you’re tweaking for penetrations.

I will still have to have non-mesh controls, such as “noodle” controls for the leg spline deformers, and anything else I simply cant fit into the main level of rig controls. However, those extra rig displays will be toggled on only when you need them. Hopefully you can get 90% of the way there with just what’s displaying in the mesh.

Oh well, lots to do still.