notes - christopher rutledge kinefx videos

general character rig workflow -

exoside quad remesh

labs 3d straight skeleton, fuse, delete half (for mirroring), resample.

use cgwiki matt estela's edge transport distance attrib propogate trick to reorder vert numbers

(edge transport "(distance)", promote to primitive (don't delete origintal), sort by distance, polypath)

rig doctor

mirror rig

joint capture biharmonic for mesh capture. joint capture paint to tweak any specific weights

stash captured geo and skele, externally(!)

plug all into joint deform.

rig wrangle to use curl noise vector attrib to mess with joint rotation/scale/pos.

he sets poses with multiple rig pose nodes. Then switch-nodes between them using a $F and modulo expression. This is nice for stepped anim style, but if you want to inbetween them,

Use a "smooth motion" node. It's used for fixing jittery mocap - but it also provides a nice tween between the different rig poses.

Another novel blending approach is to put the step anim through a solver. Inside the solver use a skeleton blend with the previous frame, using a blend value of less-than-one, for an interesting ramped blend between poses.
This can also be used with stepped blend shapes(eg for a stepped mountain sop anim). Smooth motion seems to have some nice secondary motion built in.

There is a secondary motion sop node which lets you specify a driver joint & the group to affect. Typically these will be joints down the hierarchy, eg in a tail/whip/arm. Also has some effect features - lag/overshoot, jiggle and gravity.

decent kinefx primer youtube playlist

 More of a reminder for myself... Quite a good primer on Kine FX, full body IK, posing and animation
https://youtu.be/S4Bzhnepovk

un pinning vellum constraints

in a pop wrangle, inside the vellum solver, do something like this

 if(@Frame>1175){i@stopped=0;}

as far as i know it works on Pin constraints, set to "stopped".

this vid from Sidefx explains it towards the end, sort of.

https://youtu.be/t_lyBo1U1t8

solver sop and moving geometry

So, the Solver SOP doesn't behave as "I" expected with animated (ie. moving) points/geo.

You need to manually update the position if you want your geo to still move!
SOOOOOOOOOO. Inside the solver, copy the P (for position) attribute from Input 1 to Prev Frame...

Weird stuff. But hey.

set animation curves to infinite, etc.

In the graph editor, right click the channel (eg. translate Y) and click Channels>Channel properties..
Here you can change the In and Out to whichever infinity-behaviour you'd like.

CHOPs: Some things.

• To create more channels in Noise, you'll want to change the Channel name in the Channel tab to blabla[0-100]. This makes 101 channels..so do the usual (n-1) amount. You can then have a seed per channel by using the $C token in the seed field.
• It's actually fairly annoying to blend animations in CHOPs. Create a channel and make animation curves that go from 0 to 1 in order & multiply these against other curves to activate/deactivate them.

Attribute Reorient & giving animated geo new normals for fur

Sometimes you want to reorient your normals on an object. However when you do it & it turns out that your object is animated, the new normals might not behave as expected. The normals are probably "swimming" and not following the verts/points as you'd expect.
This is because you generally want your animation done AFTER the modelling process and your new normals don't know anything about the transforms that have happened before. Simply timeshifting and attribute interpolating doesn't seem to work.

Fortunately there's a node called Attribute Reorient. It will reorient more than just normals, but so far this is the use I've had for it.

Oh - my problem was having a pre animated alembic. I wanted to alter the normals for fur direction purposes, but the pre-animation was making the normals & thus also the fur behaviour freak out. By using the Attribute Reorient to essentially force new normals onto the animated geo I sorted out my problem! WINNER.
*note* seems like it looks for the vectors in the points section..so make sure your stuff is there!