HoudiniKinefx

Kinefx

Kinefx covers a lot of ground, but there's a pleasing DNA share with a lot of established houdini workflows. Basically if you've used packed prims before and wrangles, you get the core of kinefx.

The main thing I've been playing with is @localtransform in wrangles. Each point in a line has this matrix4 attribute. If you rotate it, it is treated as a FK rotation in a joint chain, ie, rotate the elbow, and you'll have the wrist, hand, fingers all come along too in a FK style.

This means if you animate all the rotations of all the joints, you get easy wiggly waggy windy setups. So:

1. Make a line with 10 segments
2. Append a skeleton sop which will create @localtransform for you
3. Append a rig wrangle
4. Try something like this:

rotate(4@localtransform, @Time, {1,0,0});

When you scrub the timeline, you'll see the line curl up as each 'joint' is rotate over time. What if you increase the amount of rotation from the start to the end of the curve?

rotate(4@localtransform, @Time*@ptnum*0.1, {1,0,0});

or drive with a sine wave and tweak the values a bit?

rotate(4@localtransform, .2*sin(-@Time*3+@ptnum*0.2), {1,0,0});

or just be really silly, do this, and copy some lines to a sphere:

rotate(4@localtransform, .4*sin(rand(@primnum)-@Time*2+@ptnum*.05), vector(curlnoise(@P+rand(@prinum)+@Time*0.2)));

Download hip: File:kinefx_starfish.hip