Extracting Deltas for Corrective Shapes With Houdini

Extracting deltas is an important workflow for creating corrective shapes, especially when the focus is on character rigging. Maya has a few tools that assist with the creation of corrective shapes, one of them is Brave Rabbit’s extractDeltas plugin. Most tools will let ou model the corrective shape based on a base and then generate a mesh that can be used as a blend shape target before the skin is calculated.

That’s great if you are in Maya, but what about if you work in Side FX Houdini? Being that Houdini is essentially a huge sandbox, technically you can just make your own. Ramtin Ahmadi is a Technical Director at Optix Digital, and here he walks through extracting deltas for corrective shapes that later can be use in rigging. The extraction can be done using a command in textport. A great watch if you are coming to Houdini from Maya.