Procedural Character Rigging Techniques in APEX | Esther Trilsch | Houdini 20.5 HIVE Paris 

I would disagree with it being convoluted. Rigging *was* convoluted in other apps where sometimes one small mistake means starting over, or random bugs that break project, and anything complex required you to fully delve into complex coding with wierd and slow APIs because so much stuff was hidden into binaries. Sometimes the files get so giant even opening them takes seconds, and the node graph is barely understandable. But with Apex you have none of those problems, literally none. With this you are rather creating a "recipie" for a rig, which you can easily reuse and add functionality to if necessary. With the additions of the inbuild autorig scripts, for half of the simple characters you won't even need to do any added functionality, most of the basic stuff like fk, ik, lookat, spice etc is already there and all you need to do is just prepare the skeleton well and give the correct tags. I have used Apex from the day it was released and it was definitely a better experience. For once I had full control over the rig and it was amazing, even with all it's bugs at that time it was fun to use

@@fastlearner292 what is nice now is you can with nodes and not programming a digital asset of a leg. And cual us it all the time every where.

I think it's simple as long as you rely on the prebuild functions. then it's extremely simple. it gets much harder than anything you've done before when you build custom stuff. But, as 99% of the characters pretty much use the same rig. you have a humanoid auto-rig to your disposal without any effort. And now it might be much more difficult if you want to build custom stuff. Once you've build it. it's very scalable and the performance is great. So it's possible riggers in future projects will have a very short development cycle, even on projects with many many characters. People not specialized with the tech-part would be able to setup complicated rigs in no-time. And if people on the internet will share their creations. it's possible that rigging can feel like lego.

you can animate in houdini with apex and then export your character + skel anim to an fbx

@@chr1st0pher That's great. Thank you!

Autocomplete is included in apexscript with a full description of the arguments and their types plus function descriptions.

It has autocomplete. If you slow the video down you can see it

@@EstherTrilsch Thanks for the reply! The presentation was great.

One of the example files has an IK\FK switch so I think it will

We have a separate component for that, so yes

transform limits can be defined with the configure controls node for all controls. The handle and the controls take the limits on interactions into account

@@EstherTrilsch Thx for the explanation ! great job with the whole thing.