Peacock Spider Rigging Tutorial

This tutorial is part of a series of tutorials dedicated to the tiny and beautiful group of arachnids known as peacock jumping spiders.

This specific tutorial covers rigging and rigging related problems, which we address here in a production ready manner, for both Houdini and Maya.

Houdini introduced it's new and very powerful paradigm called KineFX a year or so ago, which introduces rigging at the SOP level.

Although kineFX brings a sort of a revolution in regards to rigging in Houdini,

current USD and FBX workflows don't really allow for exchange of full rig setups between DCC packages like Houdini and Maya,

and this is why we're looking at rigging and transfer solutions between the two software packages.

In our case we start with rigging the spider in Houdini, exporting the rig skeleton and skinned geo to Maya,

creating a full control rig in Maya using the power of automation with MEL and lastly,

having animation baked and exported back to Houdini, transferring this animation onto our initial Houdini rig.

From here in Houdini we can groom or attach fur to our character and then

lookdev, light and render it with Redshift and/or Karma, so stay tuned for those future tutorials!

8 hours 45 minutes of narrated and subtitled video tutorial + project files + mel scripts