I know that this is a very long shot but maybe somewhere down the road there is a plan for the Houdini version?
After all, this was first in Softimage then jumped to Maya. Maybe Houdini is the next evolution step?
And there is word that Houdini 18.5 will ahve some nice aniamtion upgrades as well so who knows… With mGear and animBot Houdini could be really good alterntaive to maya.
Hello @mirkoj
As Miquel mentioned on another post for a Max port it is not that we are against any of this. Is just a matter of resources/time.
Lets see what 2021 will bring us because there are lots of interesting things going on in our industry right now. We can only hope that in the future we will be able to keep spending more time on the development side of things.
Cheers
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Based on some experience rigging with Houdini, I would say that IF there ever is any reasonable possibility for porting mGear to another dcc, Houdini would be it. Houdini’s rigging paradigm is extremely close to Maya’s, with joints, offset groups, IK and constraints as nodes, and wiring together input and output channels. Plus you can write things like curvecns in sops so you could skip the c++ plugins.
Hard to say what 18.5 will look like though because the current implementation in H is sort of like a bad ripoff of Maya. It’s really slow since OBJ and CHOP contexts where rigs live are single threaded. People are sometimes writing 100% vex rigs because of this. I think there’s a chance they come up with something completely new and different but it might mean breaking the existing similarity with Maya.
Not endorsing a Houdini port as a good use of anyone’s time but always thought Houdini rigging vs Maya rigging was an interesting comparison.
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joints, offset groups, IK and constraints as nodes, and wiring together input and output channels
I think you are overstating their similarity, honestly. I can’t really think of any DCC where those ideas don’t apply. XSI, Modo, C4D, Blender, Max, Toon Boom, After Effects with PuppetTools and DUIK. All of these paradigms include inputs and outputs, constraints as nodes, and hierarchies.
Calling it a ripoff of Maya seems strange. Most of these concepts are fairly general, many of which do not have their origins in Maya.
Also, Houdini’s implementation of bones rather than joints is more similar to XSI, Blender or C4D, which have an inherit bone length and orientation based on the child. In Maya, the “bone” is just a display between points.
The constraint of porting mGear is not in the DCC’s similarity or differences or features, but in the complexity and effort of managing a vast project (3 cheers for Miquel!) inside an evolving ecosystem of app upgrades. (I’m not even implying it wouldn’t be worth it. I’d love to see more Houdini rigging. Someone: go build hGear. But don’t be fooled into thinking it would any easier than in any other DCC app.)
EDIT: I agreed with everything else you said. heh! 
)
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