Introducing KineFX | Henry Dean | Houdini 18.5 HIVE

From the Houdini 18.5 HIVE (Originally broadcast October 28, 2020)

A brief tour of the KineFX toolset introduced in Houdini 18.5. We'll be taking a little look under the hood of the toolset, covering a few fundamental concepts and what their implications might be for your future character work as well as investigating a couple of examples that will help you gain an initial understanding of the philosophy behind it's development and hopefully get you inspired to dive into the tools yourselves!

Henry Dean is a Character Rigger and Technical Director based in London. With a background ranging from music through development to boatbuilding, his Houdini journey began somewhere in the region of 2015 with a sole focus on character animation, rigging and exploring new techniques for breathing life into digital characters. He is currently working for SideFX on the KineFX rigging and animation framework.

0:01:00 Introduction
0:02:17 Fundamental Ideas
0:10:50 Revisitng a Prototype: Drawing curves to build chains
0:18:50 Well there's a thought: Encapsulation and Reusability
0:20:00 Applying the curve fitting to a character and adding simple ik
0:26:16 Erik's Test Rig
0:32:39 An example blendshape driven hand rig
0:36:00 Adding hands to the test rig