TumbleRig - Cartoony Rigging in Houdini | Tumblehead | Annecy HIVE 2026

Magnus will show in detail how a cartoony frog character was created in Houdini 22. He will go over the new rigging toolkit and show how the different techniques were created, from setting up the bendy limbs, a custom cartoony mouth rig and a custom eye rig (and a lot more fun effects). "TumbleRig" is a package with 30+ new rigging nodes, built on Apex, but with a more "sops focused" interface. Fans of the original version of KineFX will hopefully feel at home, and new Houdini artists will hopefully find it intuitive. Magnus Møller loves quirky, cartoony characters with an existential crisis — and he’s built a studio around making them. As co-founder of Tumblehead Animation Studio in Viborg, Denmark, he works across look development, rigging, and art direction. With a foot in both the artistic and technical sides of production — from painting moods to writing code — Houdini is his ultimate playground for creating characters and worlds. The Animation Workshop in Viborg holds a special place in his heart — a school where the craft of drawing and animation comes first. Magnus studied there and keeps coming back as a guest teacher, sharing everything from life drawing to rigging to game development. At Tumblehead, Magnus has co-directed and art directed several short films that have won prizes at festivals all around the flat earth. In 2025, he was nominated for Best Short Film at the Annie Awards for “The Swineherd,” co-directed with Peter Smith. 00:00 - Introduction & The Tumbler Rig Pitch with SideFX 00:45 - Case Study: High-Velocity Cartoony Viewport Animation 01:52 - SOPs to APEX: Building Opinionated and Customizable Rigging Tools 02:52 - CUDA Deformers: Achieving 50 FPS with Shared Memory Pointers 03:31 - Replicating Production Standards: Advanced Maya Constraints in Houdini 04:38 - Deformers in Action: Elastic Delta Mush and Wrinkle Geometry 07:01 - Rig Duplication: Live Graph Subnets and Multi-Arm Instancing 09:03 - Custom Spline Setups: Mapping Edge Loops for Eyelids and Mouths 10:39 - Sliding Meshes: Shrink Wrap Techniques and For-Each Batch Rigging 12:24 - Dual-Graph Blend Shapes and Upcoming Houdini Marketplace Release #houdini #ApexAnimation #KineFX #TumblerRig #Rigging #CharacterAnimation #SideFX #CGI #TechnicalDirector #CUDA #ProceduralAnimation #AnimationPipeline