In this series of lessons, we will learn how to use the auto-rigging tools in Houdini. By using the Auto Rig feature, we can build advanced custom rigs in a matter of minutes rather than hours so we can animate our characters quickly, consistently, and easily.

In this series of lessons we will get acquainted with the rigging process including covering different concepts such as transforms, bones, and blendshapes. We will start by going over what parenting is all about and how it relates to rigging. Then we'll learn about different Houdini constraining methods like blend objects and expressions. After that we will learn about bones and how to capture geometry with them. Finally, we will cover different rigging features like Blendpose and Blendshapes.

In this training course we will focus on building a biped skeleton. We will start with the legs and work our way up the spine to the arms and conclude with the neck. Along the way we will learn different practices and methods for drawing the bones and by the end of the project we will have our hierarchy of bones ready for the next phase.

Capture regions are a fast and simple way to bind your characters to skeletons. By learning how to manipulate these regions, we can efficiently capture our characters so that our bones can easily be deformed. We'll begin this project by learning how to capture our geometry with regions and learn how to edit and refine these regions to get good deformation on our character. We will make heavy use of the Edit Regions tool and learn different techniques in manipulating our capture regions to get the best deformation. This series of lessons picks up from the end of character skeleton building and proceeds into control rig set-up.

We'll begin this project by learning how to capture our geometry with proximity and then go into how to edit and refine these regions to get good deformation on our character. Then we will go over how to make heavy use of the Edit Capture weights and Paint Capture layer tools as well as how to use different techniques in manipulating our capture regions to get the best deformation possible. This series of lessons picks up from the end of character skeleton building and proceeds into control rig set up.

We will this start this course by learning how to set up inverse kinematics on our character's legs and how to build a reverse foot set up. Then we will learn how to set up the arms and hands and move on towards rigging the spine bones using a curve as a guide. After that, we will dig a little deeper and learn how to tweak our IK solvers to get better rig behavior. Then we will go over how to assemble and eventually package our control rig. And finally, we will spend some time working on a solid eye rig for our character.

Popular highlights include: Houdini Interface Overview; View Navigation; Object Transformations; Node-Based Workflow; Using the Network Editor; Building Various Networks; Using Shelf Tools; Parenting; Path Animation; Overview of Operators; Shading and Texturing; Rendering; Direct Lighting; Ambient Occlusion; Duplicating, Copying and Stamping; Particle Effects; Rigid Body Simulations; Modeling with NURBS and Polygons; Creating and Installing Digital Assets; Animating with Bones; Keyframe Animation; Animating with Expressions; Using the Channel Editor.