Vellum Skinning used to Improve Character Animations
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I'll be demonstrating how you can use Vellum Skin, a technique to fix overlaping geometry in character animations. Vellum Skin is an easy technique that can be used to procedural overcome the intersecting geometry and improve results without setting manual keyframes on the rig pose node.
Public Live Stream
The video link on the right is the unedited version that is freely available for the public to view.
Houdini Vellum Skin improving Character Animation
Improve Animations with Small Details
Vellum Skinning can be used to improve character animation by adding small details to the animation. On the video clip on the right, a small detail is added to the feet where it is squished down onto the ground by the Vellum Solver as the Teddy is walking.
This one of the features of the Vellum Skin technique that I love very much. You can’t create the Vellum Skin effect with manual tweaks even with the rig pose node. To get a similar effect like the Vellum Skin manually you’ll need to sculpt the geometry into that squishy shape as it hits the ground, if you really wanted to do this manually. Vellum Skin is procedural, which means you set it up once and use the same node setup unlimited times.
Vellum Skin Helps with Overlapping Geometry (aka Intersecting Geometry)
Houdini’s Vellum Skin technique can help improve Overlapping Geometry (intersecting geometry)
Have you ever had overlapping geometry in your character animations, where the arms would move into the body because the original animation had a heavier rotation on the arm?
Houdini Vellum Skin vs without Vellum Skin
Vellum Skin can also help overcome these issues and improve the character animation. The Vellum Solver will change the geometry so that it’ll make room for the arm that tries to intersect with the belly of the Teddy bear on the animation to the right.
I did a previous Kine FX tutorial that demonstrated the process of rigging characters and retargeting animations and I showed how the rig pose node can be used to fix some of these issues.