KineFX for Mechanical Animation: Rigging a Piston in Houdini

In this tutorial, I’ll walk you through how to rig a 3D piston using KineFX in SideFX Houdini. Figuring this out wasn’t easy—it took me quite a while. Up until now, I mostly used KineFX for procedural rigs on creatures and plants. But when I tried to rig a mechanical part, I quickly hit a wall. Nothing seemed to work the way I expected.

Since I couldn’t find any resources on this topic, I had to experiment, dig deep, and eventually come up with my own solution. That’s what I’ll be sharing here: a straightforward method to set up a working piston rig in Houdini’s KineFX.

Could this be done more easily in APEX? Probably. But I haven’t had the time to test that yet—that’s something I’ll explore in the future.

What You’ll Learn in This Video

✅ How to set up piston rig in Houdini

✅ Using Rig Attribute VOP to connect point transforms and add constraints

Resources & Downloads

Project File Download