Almost midterm already! We’ve finally got the rig from Josie. Unfortunately, I did not anticipate the issue of there being no way to import rigs built in Maya into Houdini. I always expect them to have more compatibility than they do and it lets me down every time.

It just added another step to the process, which is to pose in Maya and export to Houdini. I spent a lot of this weekend trying to figure out the softbody process. Currently, the workflow is this: separate the geometry into two groups: softer geo (the body) and harder geo (legs, antennae, etc.). Each group is merged together via VDB conversion, remeshed to be low-poly consistent triangles, and the two groups are merged back together. Vellum constraints are created with a cloth setup over the entire mesh, struts in the body, and shape match for the limbs. A stitch constraint holds the legs onto the body. This is fed into a Vellum solver and then the two groups are re-separated and point deformed onto their respective (the limbs require different parameter settings from the body) and merged back together to make this:

I know Yeona has been working on adding materials to things, but running into some issues. We’ll be troubleshooting that tomorrow.

Since we now have the rig and Quentin is poseable, he has an official height: 1.23 meters tall (4’0.5″ for the Americans). Here’s some updated camera angles (fair warning that I did this before Yeona’s updated bed geometry was uploaded to the scene, so he looks rather tall next to the bed).

I’m going to bed now.